{"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/transformers-contextualism-and-polysemy","title":"Transformers, Contextualism, and Polysemy","arxiv_id":"2404.09577","date":"2024-04-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jumbly Grindrod"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09577v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.09577v2.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":"transformers-contextualism-and-polysemy","repo_url":"https://github.com/jumblygrindrod/transf-cont-polysemy","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"},{"task_slug":"sensitivity","task_name":"Sensitivity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.09577","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}