From words to worlds: bridging language and thought

What do we understand when we understand language? Human language offers a broad window into the landscape of our thoughts. We talk about what we see, believe, and imagine, posing questions and communicating our plans. Language, in turn, stocks our mental inventories with new concepts and theories, communicating ideas that we might not otherwise have discovered by thinking on our own even over the course of a lifetime. How do we make meaning from language, and how, in turn, does the meaning we construct from language draw on the other resources and capacities of human thought, from perception, to mental simulation and decision making?

This talk proposes a computational framework for modeling language-informed thinking, organized into two parts. In the first talk, I consider what it means to use information in a discourse, unfolding sentence by sentence, to inform our beliefs about the world and reasoning. In the second part of this talk, I'll zoom out to the bigger picture question of how we can reason coherently about any particular context with respect to our holistic, accumulated background knowledge and beliefs.

Speaker: Lio Wong, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute