New language model for human conversation!

The explanation of ‘contextual meaning’ was a conference highlight

The breathtaking view from Kobe University looking over Osaka Bay — home to the RRG 2025 bi-annual conference.

Linguistic Conference: RRG 2025

The linguistic conference in Kobe, Japan, has just wrapped up. Expert linguists from around the world gave English presentations of progress over 2 days in a variety of languages including: Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Breton, Vietnamese, German, Mandarin, Mexican languages, Taiwan Sign language, and a range of African languages. They all use RRG as the model of communications. Primary developer, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., has continued work on and growing the global community since the early 1980s.

What makes Van Valin’s contributions so significant in the 20th and 21st century is its adoption of a model in which the words in a language link to its meaning with a single algorithm, regardless of the language. While all languages differ in vocabulary, phrases, writing and pronunciation, it is amazing that a single model explains the common features of them all.

In my view, this year’s breakthrough presentations were given in a paper “Towards a new representation of discourse in RRG” by Balogh, Bentley and Shimojo. This was then strongly supported by Van Valin’s keynote presentation, “Information Structure and Argument Linking…