Word meaning in minds and machines

Psychological semantics is the study of how people represent the meanings of words and then build sentence meaning out of those representations. People use language dozens of time a day--to have conversations and give instructions, to read and write, to label objects and teach. A theory of psychological semantics must provide the basis for how people do all those things, choosing which words to use and understanding the words they read or hear. In this article we focus on the mental representation of word meaning. Human language is still the gold standard for a communication system, but artificial intelligence (AI) systems have made important progress in language use. Research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) develops systems that understand language to the degree that computers can carry out useful tasks. As described below, such systems use vast text corpora to learn about words, using neural networks and other statistical models. The recent explosion of research in NLP, driven largely by advances in neural networks (also called deep learning), has resulted in continuously improving performance on various benchmarks that require interpreting words and sentences. Systems are now used in interfaces with customers to make sales or solve problems.