How Is Meaning Grounded in Dictionary Definitions?

TL;DR

This paper explores how dictionary definitions can be grounded in sensorimotor experience to break the circularity of meaning, introducing the concept of reachable sets and algorithms to compute them.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of reachable sets, enabling the derivation of larger vocabulary meanings from grounded smaller vocabularies through definitional relationships.

Findings

Reachable sets can be computed algorithmically for any dictionary.

Grounding a small vocabulary allows learning of larger vocabulary meanings.

The approach addresses the symbol grounding problem in semantics.

Abstract

Meaning cannot be based on dictionary definitions all the way down: at some point the circularity of definitions must be broken in some way, by grounding the meanings of certain words in sensorimotor categories learned from experience or shaped by evolution. This is the "symbol grounding problem." We introduce the concept of a reachable set -- a larger vocabulary whose meanings can be learned from a smaller vocabulary through definition alone, as long as the meanings of the smaller vocabulary are themselves already grounded. We provide simple algorithms to compute reachable sets for any given dictionary.