Do Language Models' Words Refer?

The meaning of ‘meaning’

Putnam, Hilary. 1975 · 1975

Earlier work this paper cites.

Speaker’s reference and semantic reference

Kripke, Saul. 1977 · 1977

Earlier work this paper cites.

Naming and Necessity

Kripke, Saul. 1980 · 1980

Earlier work this paper cites.

Reason, Truth, and History

Putnam, Hilary. 1981 · 1981

Earlier work this paper cites.

The Varieties of Reference

Evans, Gareth. 1982 · 1982

Earlier work this paper cites.

Using Language

Clark, Herbert H. 1996 · 1996

Earlier work this paper cites.

The speech community

Patrick, Peter L. 2004 · 2004

Earlier work this paper cites.

Societal grounding is essential to meaningful language use

DeVault, David, Iris Oved, and Matthew Stone. 2006 · 2006

Earlier work this paper cites.

The Reference Book

Hawthorne, John and David Manley. 2012 · 2012

Cited alongside, same era.

Speech Communities

Morgan, Marcyliena H. 2014 · 2014

Cited alongside, same era.

Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data

Bender, Emily M. and Alexander Koller. 2020 · 2020

Cited alongside, same era.

Is it possible for language models to achieve language understanding?

Potts, Christopher. 2020 · 2020

Cited alongside, same era.

On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021 · 2021

Cited alongside, same era.

Sharing our concepts with machines

Butlin, Patrick. 2021 · 2021

Cited alongside, same era.

Entailment semantics can be extracted from an ideal language model

Merrill, William, Alex Warstadt, and Tal Linzen. 2022 · 2022

Later among the works it cites.

Meaning without reference in large language models

Piantadosi, Steven T. and Felix Hill. 2022 · 2022

Later among the works it cites.

Could a large language model be conscious?

Original

Chalmers, David J. 2023 · 2023

Closest in time.

The vector grounding problem

Original

Mollo, Dimitri Coelho and Raphaël Millière. 2023 · 2023

Closest in time.

Symbols and grounding in large language models

Pavlick, Elle. 2023 · 2023

Closest in time.

Are language models more like libraries or like librarians? Bibliotechnism, the novel reference problem, and the attitudes of LLMs