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Transformers, contextualism, and polysemy

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Grindrod, J. orcid id iconORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8684-974X (2025) Transformers, contextualism, and polysemy. Ergo. ISSN 2330-4014 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

The transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017), is at the heart of the remarkable recent progress in the development of language models, including widely-used chatbots such as Chat-GPT and Claude. In this paper, I argue that we can extract from the way the transformer architecture works a theory of the relationship between context and meaning. I call this the transformer theory, and I argue that it is novel with regard to two related philosophical debates: the contextualism debate regarding the extent of context-sensitivity across natural language, and the polysemy debate regarding how polysemy should be captured within an account of word meaning.

Item Type Article
URI https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/120383
Refereed Yes
Divisions Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Philosophy
Publisher Michigan Publishing
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