On Meaning without Use

Recognizing Humor Without Recognizing Meaning

We present a machine learning approach for classifying sentences as one-liner jokes or normal sentences. We use no deep analysis of the meaning to try to see if it is humorous, instead we rely on a combination of simple features to see if these are enough to detect humor. Features such as word overlap with other jokes, presence of words common in jokes, ambiguity and word overlap with common id...

On the Meaning and Use of Kurtosis

For symmetric unimodal distributions, positive kurtosis indicates heavy tails and peakedness relative to the normal distribution, whereas negative kurtosis indicates light tails and flatness. Many textbooks, however, describe or illustrate kurtosis incompletely or incorrectly. In this article, kurtosis is illustrated with well-known distributions, and aspects of its interpretation and misinterp...

Meaning and Use

This paper deals with the meaning of natural language expressions, and how meanings of expressions are used in communication. The two disciplines that talk most about meanings of expressions are linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy. This paper is about topics discussed in both disciplines. The first part of the paper is more philosophical in nature and discusses what is meaning...

On Saying What You Mean without Meaning What You Say1

Establishing Communication Systems without Explicit Meaning Transmission

This paper investigates the development of experience-based meaning creation and explores the problem of establishing successful communication systems in a population of agents. The aim of the work is to investigate how such systems can develop, without reliance on phenomena not found in actual human language learning, such as the explicit transmission of meaning or the provision of reliable er...