Selected Papers on the Symbol Grounding Problem
In this list, I collect papers on the symbol grounding problem.
Classic Papers and Foundations
- Searle, J. (1980). Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457.
- Searle, J. R. (1982). The Chinese Room Revisited. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2), 345–348.
- Harnad, S. (1990). The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1), 335–346.
- Harnad, S. (2000). Minds, Machines and Turing. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 9(4), 425–445.
- Cole, D. (2024). The Chinese Room Argument. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.
The Symbol Grounding Problem in the Age of LLMs
- Bender, E. M., & Koller, A. (2020). Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5185–5198.
- Pavlick, E. (2023). Symbols and Grounding in Large Language Models. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 381(2251).
- Dove, G. (2024). Symbol Ungrounding: What the Successes (and Failures) of Large Language Models Reveal About Human Cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1911).
- Mandelkern, M., & Linzen, T. (2024). Do Language Models’ Words Refer? Computational Linguistics, 50(3), 1191–1200.
- Grindrod, J. (2024). Large Language Models and Linguistic Intentionality. Synthese, 204(2), 71.
- Gubelmann, R. (2024). Pragmatic Norms Are All You Need – Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 11663–11678).
- Mollo, D. C., & Millière, R. (2025). The Vector Grounding Problem. arXiv.
NLP Work on Multi-Modality
- Alonso, I., Azkune, G., Salaberria, A., Barnes, J., & Lacalle, O. L. D. (2025). Vision-Language Models Struggle to Align Entities across Modalities. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 (pp. 18846–18862).
- Szot, A., Mazoure, B., Agrawal, H., Hjelm, D., Kira, Z., & Toshev, A. (2024). Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models in Actions. arXiv.
Other
See also my posts on this issue: