Machines of Meaning

One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to learn meaningful representations for natural language expressions, but what this entails is not always clear. A variety of new linguistic behaviours present themselves embodied as computers, enhanced humans, and collectives with various kinds of integration and communication. But to measure and understand the behaviours generated by such systems, we must clarify the language we use to talk about them. Computational models are often confused with the phenomena they try to model and shallow metaphors are used as justifications for (or to hype) the success of computational techniques on many tasks related to natural language; thus implying their progress toward human-level machine intelligence without ever clarifying what that means. This paper discusses the challenges in the specification of "machines of meaning", machines capable of acquiring meaningful semantics from natural language in order to achieve their goals. We characterize "meaning" in a computational setting, while highlighting the need for detachment from anthropocentrism in the study of the behaviour of machines of meaning. The pressing need to analyse AI risks and ethics requires a proper measurement of its capabilities which cannot be productively studied and explained while using ambiguous language. We propose a view of "meaning" to facilitate the discourse around approaches such as neural language models and help broaden the research perspectives for technology that facilitates dialogues between humans and machines.