At Interaction Level 2, meaning emerges from pairwise interactions between tokens. This level is critical for generating idiomatic expressions, cultural connotations, and semantic shifts.
Examples:
Crocodile tears a figurative expression denoting fake or insincere emotion
Tearful eyes a descriptive phrase with emotional valence
Eye of the crocodile a phrase that can imply vigilance, danger, or a poetic metaphor
Here, sequence and adjacency begin to matter. The same two words (crocodile and tears) can yield different meanings when reordered (tears of a crocodile vs. crocodile's tears), due to syntactic directionality and cultural associations.
Emergent Properties:
Connotation: subtle shades of meaning (e.g., sorrow, deception)
Idiom formation: fixed or semi-fixed expressions
Emotional charge: expressions now carry affective content
Implication for AI:
LLMs need mechanisms beyond token probability to interpret Level 2 interactions. Current embedding models often struggle with polysemy, sarcasm, and cultural idioms unless they are highly represented in training data.
C. Level 3 --- Three-word Interaction: Artistic, Symbolic, and Semiotic Emergence
At Interaction Level 3, we observe the onset of semiotic systems, aesthetic constructs, and high-level symbolic meaning. These triadic interactions exhibit non-linearity in semantic construction---the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Examples:
Crocodile tears eyes: ambiguous, poetic, possibly surreal
Eyes of crocodile tears: evokes emotion through complex metaphoric layering
Crocodile's tearful eyes: could represent anthropomorphization, irony, or satire
Interpretive Dimensions:
Metaphoric chaining: meaning is transferred across elements (e.g., tears insincerity predator)
Semiotic layering: multiple cultural and emotional signals coexist
Aesthetic emergence: structure and sound (e.g., rhythm or irony) contribute to perceived beauty or impact
Relevance to AI:
Traditional LLMs like GPT or BERT tend to flatten such expressions into surface-level approximations or disregard low-frequency phrases as statistical noise. Yet, for human-level language understanding, these constructs are central in poetry, literature, memes, and political discourse.
Summary Table: Interaction Levels
