Leiden University Scholarly Publications

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Dijk, B.M.A. van (2025)

Theory of mind in language, minds, and machines: a multidisciplinary approach

Doctoral Thesis
Humans can see the world through the eyes of other humans and imagine what they know, want, and intend. This competence is known as Theory of Mind. One way to encode and decode Theory of Mind in social traffic is by using language. This dissertation examines the relationship between Theory of Mind and language through narratives as a natural place for finding minds and the ways they are presented via language. By employing computational, qualitative and experimental approaches, varying from narratological theory to recent language models from artificial intelligence, this dissertation aspires to provide a new perspective on the relationship between two key human competences. In brief this dissertation's findings are that complex story character minds are often accompanied by more a complex story language; that children represent story character speech and thought in many different ways; that language models can be useful tools in unravelling language development; that only a few...Show moreHumans can see the world through the eyes of other humans and imagine what they know, want, and intend. This competence is known as Theory of Mind. One way to encode and decode Theory of Mind in social traffic is by using language. This dissertation examines the relationship between Theory of Mind and language through narratives as a natural place for finding minds and the ways they are presented via language. By employing computational, qualitative and experimental approaches, varying from narratological theory to recent language models from artificial intelligence, this dissertation aspires to provide a new perspective on the relationship between two key human competences. In brief this dissertation's findings are that complex story character minds are often accompanied by more a complex story language; that children represent story character speech and thought in many different ways; that language models can be useful tools in unravelling language development; that only a few large language models show behaviour consistent with having Theory of Mind competence; and that a pragmatic perspective on ‘real understanding’ in LLMs can nuance current debates about cognitive capacities in recent artificially intelligent language models.
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Theory of Mind
Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models
Speech and Thought Representation
All authors
Dijk, B.M.A. van
Supervisor
Spruit, M.R.
Co-supervisor
Duijn, M.J. van
Committee
Bonsangue, M.M.; Verberne, S.; Bosch, A.P.J. van den; Tiberius, C.P.A.; Beekhuizen, B.F.
Qualification
Doctor (dr.)
Awarding Institution
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Faculty of Science, Leiden University
Date
2025-01-17

Funding

Sponsorship
The research in this dissertation was partly made possible by collaboration with Max van Duijn’s NWO-funded research project ‘A Telling Story’, project number VI.Veni.191C.051