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Technology & AIAug 28, 2026

A Formal Limitation on Learning Human Language From Textual Corpora

Can a listener recover what a speaker means from the form of an utterance alone?

Can a listener recover what a speaker means from the form of an utterance alone? We answer this question information-theoretically, and for a listener given by any featurizer of text, including the hidden states of contemporary large language models. Modeling language use as a…

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