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Bender and Koller's paper of July 2020 argues that a system trained only on linguistic form has a priori no way to learn meaning, so that the language-modelling task cannot in principle lead to learning meaning. Copy claim link
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Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Date 2020-07 · publication Records dated 2020 → Role Articulation Register (kind of text) Nonfiction Scope and limits The paper concerns meaning and understanding, defining meaning as the relation between form and communicative intent; it does not discuss whether such systems pursue goals.
The evidence 02 primary source Supports the claim
Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data ↗ Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL Anthology 2020.acl-main.463) · 2020-07
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Source excerpt “we argue that a system trained only on form has a priori no way to learn meaning” Location in source Abstract, PDF p. 1
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-10-31
Source details and check notes Authors Emily M. Bender; Alexander Koller Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 48823a487ee233ff567aa3fdd3c3f20f8425f0182b6f213c4c7f1e929d2bff77). Published proceedings PDF, ACL Anthology. Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-29 Language English (en) Attribution Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller, “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data”, 2020-07. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, arguments about catastrophic risk from advanced AI (research/risk-debate). The quotation (17 words) matched the text retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29. Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. No human editorial review. primary source Supports the claim
Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data ↗ Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL Anthology 2020.acl-main.463) · 2020-07
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Cite the original source Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.
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Source excerpt “the language modeling task, because it only uses form as training data, cannot in principle lead to learning of meaning” Location in source Section 1, PDF p. 1
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-10-31
Source details and check notes Authors Emily M. Bender; Alexander Koller Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 48823a487ee233ff567aa3fdd3c3f20f8425f0182b6f213c4c7f1e929d2bff77). Published proceedings PDF, ACL Anthology. Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-29 Language English (en) Attribution Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller, “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data”, 2020-07. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, arguments about catastrophic risk from advanced AI (research/risk-debate). The quotation (20 words) matched the text retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29. Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Not reviewed by an editor . An exploratory record that no editor has accepted. This status does not say whether a person has read any linked passage. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
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Record ID rd-r14-bender-koller-2020-climbing-nlu