Standard Grant: Productive Ambiguity in Classification

这是生物学历史和哲学上的一个项目，对数据密集型科学有着非常重大的影响。PI将调查分类法的历史如何在数据密集型科学领域揭示模棱两可的科学价值。该项目侧重于检测科学语言作为社会环境变化的功能的模糊性价值的权衡。准确的消歧依赖于共享的知识和能力背景，当概念传播到新的环境或社区变得更大、更异构时，这可能被证明是不够的。该项目将资助研究生和本科生的研究助理分析从两个世纪的生物分类学历史中提取的文本语料库。它还将支持公共活动和教育材料的创作，以解决命名和分类中产生歧义的主题。本项目将实施一个综合的概念框架，以便对语言环境中的歧义进行实证研究。它将使用来自认知语用学的信息论框架，以一种开放式的方式来量化歧义，这种方式足以适应影响人类语言和交流的各种现象，同时也反映了计算机所需的特定约束。它将提供新颖的工具，在对潜在的社会制度和个体差异保持敏感的同时，在群体而不是个人的层面上追踪语言的变化。该项目的结果将为系统学中类型和亚种的历史开辟新的视角，并将为当代关于人类语言和意义的计算表示中最大确定性的优点的辩论提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This is a project in the history and philosophy of biology that has very substantial ramifications for data-intensive science. The PI will investigate how the history of taxonomy can shed new light on the value of ambiguity for science in the domain of data-intensive science. The project focuses on detecting trade-offs in the value of ambiguity for scientific language as a function of changing social contexts. Accurate disambiguation relies on a shared background of knowledge and abilities, which may prove inadequate as concepts spread into new contexts or a community grows larger and more heterogeneous. The project will fund graduate and undergraduate research assistants to analyze a text corpus drawn from two centuries of history in biological taxonomy. It will also support public events and the creation of educational materials addressing the theme of productive ambiguity in naming and classification.This project will implement an integrative conceptual framework enabling empirical investigation of ambiguity in linguistic settings. It will use an information-theoretic framework from cognitive pragmatics to quantify ambiguity in a way that is open-ended enough to accommodate a wide range of phenomena shaping human language and communication while also reflecting the specific constraints required by computers. It will provide novel tools for tracking changes in language at the level of populations rather than individuals while remaining sensitive to underlying social institutions and individual differences. Results from this project will open new perspectives on the history of types and subspecies in systematics, and it will inform contemporary debates about the virtues of maximal determinacy in the computational representation of human language and meaning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.