Dr. Fritz Günther (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is giving a talk about:

Symbol grounding-by-language: Computational and behavioral investigations

We learn new words on an almost daily basis, more often than not solely from written or spoken langauge and without any accompanying change in our direct environment. Assuming the premise of theories of grounded cognition that meaning arises from (the simulation or reactivation of) sensorimotor experience with word referents, how can we still understand these words? This issue is especially pressing for abstract words, but also concerns non-experienced concrete words. In this talk, I will examine the role of language itself as a vehicle to propagate sensorimotor information through semantic memory. This includes a detailed discussion of how word meanings can be induced from their distributional patterns in language, and how distributional semantic models utilize this to derive high-dimensional vectors representing word meanings from large natural language corpora.