Symbolic meaning and vector semantics
Peng Wang, P. A. SMITH · 2025
For humans, language is a system of symbols, or a ‘symbolic’ sign system. Structuralism opens a new dimension for scientists to approach meaning through the internal structure of natural language, before linking signs to the physical world. The idea of symbols and structuralism allows human intelligence to be directly and conveniently projected onto computer programming, to generate artificial intelligence. Technically speaking, there are two fundamental approaches for a computer program to represent meaning based on structuralism: one is localist, considering each linguistic sign as an independent atomic unit; the other is distributional, spreading meaning across a range of features associated with a linguistic sign.