Description du projet
Gagner une compréhension approfondie des mécanismes d’abstraction du langage
Les humains utilisent des mots pour communiquer des concepts dont le caractère concret (la banane est concrète, la faim est abstraite) et la spécificité (la banane est spécifique, la nourriture est générique) varient. Le caractère concret et la spécificité constituent les deux variables qui interviennent dans le mécanisme d’abstraction. Le projet ABSTRACTION, financé par l’UE, étudiera les effets du caractère concret et de la spécificité. Les chercheurs auront recours à une technique de ludification innovante afin de collecter des données liées à la spécificité pour des milliers de mots en anglais et en italien. Ils mèneront ensuite des expériences comportementales et procèderont à des analyses statistiques pour expliquer l’interaction entre la spécificité et le caractère concret dans l’esprit humain. Les résultats revêtiront une grande importance pour les sciences cognitives et la recherche dans le domaine de l’IA.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
40126 Bologna
Italie