SCSB Lunch Series: From words to worlds: bridging language and thought for language-informed thinking 

Date: Friday, September 13,  2024
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/93456739273]

Speaker: Lio Wong,  Ph.D.
Affiliation: MIT Postdoctoral Researcher, Tenenbaum Lab, BCS, MIT

Talk title: From words to worlds: bridging language and thought for language-informed thinking 
Abstract: 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? In this talk, I’ll overview an overarching framework, Rational Meaning Construction, which proposes how natural language can construct arbitrary expressions in a flexible, symbolic, and probabilistic language of thought that supports general inferences. I present examples and experiments demonstrating the range of this theory, modeling how concrete propositions and questions in language can update and query beliefs about the physical and social world. I’ll then present newer work showing how the same framework can be used to construct and propose world models from scratch that can be used to make sense of new language, and to relate language to decision making and planning.