Finding Answers to Questions: Bridging between Type-based and Computational Neuroscience Approaches

Staffan Larsson, Jonathan Ginzburg, Robin Cooper, Andy Lücking

Keywords: Neurosymbolic, semantics, type theory, computational neuroscience, question answering

TL;DR: Questions and answers can be dealt with in neurosymbolic semantics, using a neurosymbolic implementation of lambda calculus.

Abstract:

The paper outlines an account of how the brain might process questions and answers in linguistic interaction, focusing on accessing answers in memory and combining questions and answers into propositions. To enable this, we provide an approximation of the lambda calculus implemented in the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), a neural implementation of a Vector Symbolic Architecture. The account builds a bridge between the type-based accounts of propositions in memory (as in the treatments of belief by Ranta, 1994 and Cooper, 2023) and the suggestion for question answering made by Eliasmith (2013) where question answering is described in terms of transformations of structured representations in memory providing an answer.

We will take such representations to correspond to beliefs of the agent. On Cooper's analysis, beliefs are considered to be types which have a record structure closely related to the structure which Eliasmith codes in vector representations. Thus the act of answering a question can be seen to have a neural base in a vector transformation translatable in Eliasmith's system to activity of spiking neurons and to correspond to using an item in memory (a belief) to provide an answer to the question.

Scope Confirmation: To the best of my judgment, this submission falls within the scope of CoNLL.

Primary Area Selection: Language and the Brain

Secondary Area Selection: Lexical, Compositional and Discourse Semantics

Use Of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools: No, not at all

Data Collection From Human Subjects: No

Submission Type: Non-archival (fill out the field below).

Publication Data: IWCS 2025, 16th international conference on computational semantics (pp. 118-126). https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-main.11.pdf

Submission Number: 235