Abstract
In this paper we discuss the socialization hypothesis—the idea that speakers of the same (linguistic) community should share similar concepts given that they are exposed to similar environments and operate in highly-coordinated social contexts—and challenge the fact that it is assumed to constitute a prerequisite to successful communication. We do so using distributional semantic models of meaning (DSMs) which create lexical representations via latent aggregation of co-occurrence information between words and contexts. We argue that DSMs constitute particularly adequate tools for exploring the socialization hypothesis given that 1) they provide full control over the notion of background environment, formally characterized as the training corpus from which distributional information is aggregated; and 2) their geometric structure allows for exploiting alignment-based similarity metrics to measure inter-subject alignment over an entire semantic space, rather than a set of limited entries. We propose to model coordination between two different DSMs trained on two distinct corpora as dimensionality selection over a dense matrix obtained via Singular Value Decomposition This approximates an ad-hoc coordination scenario between two speakers as the attempt to align their similarity ratings on a set of word pairs. Our results underline the specific way in which linguistic information is spread across singular vectors, and highlight the need to distinguish agreement from mere compatibility in alignment-based notions of conceptual similarity. Indeed, we show that compatibility emerges from idiosyncrasy so that the unique and distinctive aspects of speakers’ background experiences can actually facilitate—rather than impede—coordination and communication between them. We conclude that the socialization hypothesis may constitute an unnecessary prerequisite to successful communication and that, all things considered, communication is probably best formalized as the cooperative act of avoiding conflict, rather than maximizing agreement.
Highlights
Psychological approaches to semantic and conceptual knowledge rely on intertwined yet distinct notions of concepts and words (Malt et al, 2015; Malt, 2019): concepts are “the building blocks of thought” taken to be crucial to cognition at large (Margolis and Laurence, 2019), while words are “the smallest linguistic expressions conventionally associated with non-compositional meaning [. . .] which can be articulated in isolation to convey semantic content” (Gasparri and Marconi, 2019)
We argue that those models prove suited for assessing the validity of the socialization hypothesis, given that 1) they provide full control over speakers’ background experiences, formalized experimentally as the training corpus from which distributional information is aggregated; 2) their geometric structure allows for exploiting alignment-based similarity metrics to measure inter-subject alignment, and do so over an entire semantic space rather than a set of limited entries, thereby overcoming the experimental shortcomings of testing on human subjects; and 3) their overall generation pipeline parallels humans’ conceptual processing in a cognitively plausible fashion
We show in addition that this result is fundamentally grounded in the fact that different dimensions in the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) encode different semantic phenomena, so that Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) can capture a collection of possible meaning spaces from the same set of data, rather than a single one
Summary
Psychological approaches to semantic and conceptual knowledge rely on intertwined yet distinct notions of concepts and words (Malt et al, 2015; Malt, 2019): concepts are “the building blocks of thought” taken to be crucial to cognition at large (Margolis and Laurence, 2019), while words are “the smallest linguistic expressions conventionally associated with non-compositional meaning [. . .] which can be articulated in isolation to convey semantic content” (Gasparri and Marconi, 2019). . .] which can be articulated in isolation to convey semantic content” (Gasparri and Marconi, 2019) Those psychological approaches— referred to as cognitivist or subjectivist (Gärdenfors, 2014; Barsalou, 2017; Pelletier, 2017)—assume concepts, unlike words, to be private mental entities, which poses a major challenge for communication, for how could two speakers communicate if the words they utter do not refer to identical concepts? Recent work in cognitive science has attempted to come to term with the idea that concepts may vary widely across individuals, some even suggesting that it may not necessarily represent an obstacle to communication, as what matters is that speakers coordinate during conversation and align their conceptual representations on aspects relevant to the situation under discussion (see Section 2.3)
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