Descripción del proyecto
Hacia una comprensión más profunda de los mecanismos de abstracción del lenguaje
Las personas utilizan palabras para comunicar conceptos que varían en cuanto a concreción (plátano es concreto, hambre es abstracto) y especificidad (plátano es específico, comida es genérico). La concreción y la especificidad son dos variables que intervienen en el mecanismo de la abstracción. El equipo del proyecto ABSTRACTION, financiado con fondos europeos, investigará los efectos de la concreción y la especificidad. Los investigadores utilizarán una técnica de ludificación innovadora para recopilar datos sobre la especificidad de miles de palabras en inglés e italiano. A continuación, realizarán experimentos conductuales y análisis estadísticos para explicar la forma en que la especificidad interactúa con la concreción en la mente humana. Los hallazgos serán de gran importancia para la ciencia cognitiva y la investigación en inteligencia artificial.
Objetivo
Words, language's building blocks, are labels that define different types of categories. Some words define categories of concrete entities (cats, tables) while others define abstract entities (legacy, empathy). Some words define generic categories that encompass many different entities (vehicles, art) while others define more specific ones (sport cars, Impressionism).
To unlock meaning from experience, we construct different types of categories through mechanisms of abstraction. Concreteness and specificity are the two variables that support abstractions.
However, when investigating the mechanisms and effects of abstraction, scholars from different fields typically focus only on specificity or only on concreteness. Relying on different and partial definitions of abstraction, the debate across scientific communities is impaired and the theoretical development is jeopardized. This is also due to the fact that human-generated resources to measure specificity do not exist.
The ABSTRACTION team will collect specificity data for thousands of words in 2 languages (English and Italian) through an innovative gamification technique. Using this data and other lexical resources, we will run extensive statistical analyses aimed at explaining how specificity interacts with concreteness in:
- Thought, to explain contrasting findings that have been previously attributed to concreteness alone
- Language, to construct texts that are optimally clear and informative for the target readerships
- Creativity, to construct effective metaphors in different contexts
ABSTRACTION will explain how word specificity and concreteness enable us to unlock meaning from experience and achieve the higher-order generalizations on which much of our thinking and talking relies. This is a hot topic in cognitive science, where the grounding of abstract concepts is an open question, and in AI research, where it is still unknown how machines may construct and use concepts in the way humans do.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
40126 Bologna
Italia