{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-language-of-generalization","title":"The Language of Generalization","arxiv_id":"1608.02926","date":"2016-08-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Michael Henry Tessler","Noah D. Goodman"],"abstract":"Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to\neach other (e.g., \"Birds fly\", \"John hikes\", \"Fire makes smoke\"). Though found\nin every language and emerging early in development, the language of\ngeneralization is philosophically puzzling and has resisted precise\nformalization. Here, we propose the first formal account of generalizations\nconveyed with language that makes quantitative predictions about human\nunderstanding. We test our model in three diverse domains: generalizations\nabout categories (generic language), events (habitual language), and causes\n(causal language). The model explains the gradience in human endorsement\nthrough the interplay between a simple truth-conditional semantic theory and\ndiverse beliefs about properties, formalized in a probabilistic model of\nlanguage understanding. This work opens the door to understanding precisely how\nabstract knowledge is learned from language.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02926v4","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.02926v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-language-of-generalization","repo_url":"https://github.com/mhtess/genlang-paper","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}