{"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/toward-a-thermodynamics-of-meaning","title":"Toward a Thermodynamics of Meaning","arxiv_id":"2009.11963","date":"2020-09-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jonathan Scott Enderle"],"abstract":"As language models such as GPT-3 become increasingly successful at generating realistic text, questions about what purely text-based modeling can learn about the world have become more urgent. Is text purely syntactic, as skeptics argue? Or does it in fact contain some semantic information that a sufficiently sophisticated language model could use to learn about the world without any additional inputs? This paper describes a new model that suggests some qualified answers to those questions. By theorizing the relationship between text and the world it describes as an equilibrium relationship between a thermodynamic system and a much larger reservoir, this paper argues that even very simple language models do learn structural facts about the world, while also proposing relatively precise limits on the nature and extent of those facts. This perspective promises not only to answer questions about what language models actually learn, but also to explain the consistent and surprising success of cooccurrence prediction as a meaning-making strategy in AI.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11963v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.11963v1.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":"toward-a-thermodynamics-of-meaning","repo_url":"https://github.com/senderle/lexpart","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-3","method_name":"GPT-3"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}