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Meaning without reference in large language models

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arxiv 2208.02957 v2 pith:XTNDEANB submitted 2022-08-05 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords meaningllmstheyconceptualhumaninternallanguagelarge
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The widespread success of large language models (LLMs) has been met with skepticism that they possess anything like human concepts or meanings. Contrary to claims that LLMs possess no meaning whatsoever, we argue that they likely capture important aspects of meaning, and moreover work in a way that approximates a compelling account of human cognition in which meaning arises from conceptual role. Because conceptual role is defined by the relationships between internal representational states, meaning cannot be determined from a model's architecture, training data, or objective function, but only by examination of how its internal states relate to each other. This approach may clarify why and how LLMs are so successful and suggest how they can be made more human-like.

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Forward citations

Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 71 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. The time course of visuo-semantic representations in the human brain is captured by combining vision and language models

    q-bio.NC 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A fusion of vision DNN and LLM representations predicts human EEG responses to images better than either model alone, with distinct temporal and spectral signatures.

  2. On the Semantics of Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    LLMs plausibly have Fregean 'sense' semantics but not reference, so the question of whether they understand depends on the theory of meaning.

  3. A quantum semantic framework for natural language processing

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper reports CHSH inequality violations from LLM interpretations of ambiguous sentences and uses them to claim that linguistic meaning is non-classical and observer-dependent.

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