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communicative intents

Communicative intents are the underlying goals, purposes, or desired mental effects that a speaker or writer aims to convey to an interlocutor through an act of communication. In linguistics, cognitive science, and natural language processing, communicative intent represents the world-grounded objective of an utterance, such as conveying a specific belief, making a request, or prompting an action. It is distinct from pure linguistic form, which comprises the observable symbols, characters, or acoustic patterns, as well as conventional standing meaning, serving instead as the context-dependent message and purposeful agency that an interlocutor must infer for full linguistic understanding to occur.

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Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller

OrganizationsSaarland UniversityUniversity of Washington

Why you should read this

Establishes foundational theoretical limits for large language models by demonstrating that systems trained exclusively on raw text form cannot, in principle, acquire semantic meaning or achieve genuine natural language understanding without grounding in external intent.

The success of the large neural language models on many NLP tasks is exciting. However, we find that these successes sometimes lead to hype in which these models are being described as "understanding" language or capturing "meaning". In this position paper, we argue that a system trained only on form has a priori no way to learn meaning. In keeping with the ACL 2020 theme of "Taking Stock of Where We've Been and Where We're Going", we argue that a clear understanding of the distinction between form and meaning will help guide the field towards better science around natural language understanding.

Added

2026-09-25