Description
Our century is witnessing unprecedented efforts to understand the underlying struc-ture of how meaning is built and processed by human minds. For some, the ultimate
goal of such efforts is artificial intelligence.
In that respect, it seems that we are still in a sort of “alchemical period” for
the study of meaning representation and processing: several intuitions about how
meaning can be structured have combined with our capacity to store and process
vast amounts of data, producing a myriad of approaches to handle certain particular
tasks. However, no one appears to have a clear idea of how meaning is formed at
a more fundamental level. Therefore, similarly to how the alchemical period has
been superseded by modern scientific theories, our efforts in what concerns mean-
ing representation should also be that of developing well-principled theories of how
meaning is represented and processed, beyond the good performance of individual
specific tasks. Following some of the recent developments in quantum cognition,
precisely underlying such attempt to find a well-principled theory of how concepts
are formed and decisions are made by human minds, we present a formalism that
promises to be able to handle at a fundamental level the complexities of meaning
representation for a collection of documents (such as those forming the World Wide
Web). Namely, we associate a quantum-like ‘entity of meaning’ to a ‘language
entity formed by printed documents’. A language entity is hence conceived as a
collection of traces left by the entity of meaning, resulting from a “measurement
interaction” between a “user” (which does not have to be necessarily a human) and
the collection of documents. Therefore, a collection of documents, like the Web, is
described as the space of manifestation of a more complex entity – the QWeb – which
is the object of our modeling. More precisely, we explain how to build a QWeb that
accounts for the correlations between words appearing in printed documents, e.g.,
co-occurrences, and we show that both ‘quantum context and interference effects’
are required to explain the probabilities calculated by counting the relative number
of documents containing certain words and their co-ocurrrences. We also discuss
the potential applications of our formalism to other types of media, such as images
and videos.
Periode | 10 okt 2018 |
---|---|
Evenementstitel | Quantum Cagliari 2018 |
Evenementstype | Conference |
Locatie | Cagliary, Italy |
Mate van erkenning | International |