Lecture
SAILS Lunch Time Seminar: Tom Kouwenhoven
- Date
- Monday 21 September 2026
- Time
- Location
- Online only
Collaborative Meaning-Making in Human-Machine interactions
Abstract:
Humans share meaning through language. Over time, repeated interactions have shaped languages into forms that match our cognitive preferences, making them structured, expressive, easy to learn, and ultimately, meaningful. Today, large language models, as artificial minds, have become proficient new language users too. Though they differ from humans in key respects, they use languages in ways that increasingly mirror the dynamics of human communication. By studying both humans and artificial models of language in interactive experimental setups, my work aims to uncover how these different kinds of minds create, adapt, and share meaning. In this talk, I will present a series of experiments spanning the emergence of communication in human-machine meaning-making, cross-modal associations in vision-and-language models, LLM perspective-taking.
Biography
My work is situated between Artificial Intelligence, Language evolution, and Cognitive psychology. I take inspiration from the field of Language Evolution and try to combine it with my background in AI to create adaptive machine learning algorithms which facilitate natural interactions between humans and machines. With this project, I aim to develop methods that result in mutual understanding about words and their corresponding meanings such that both, humans, and computers better understand each other.
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