Natural Language Processing and the Representation of Phenomenal Experience
Technology and language January 16, 2026 Pavel Baryshnikov, L. A. Velis, Magomet N. Atakuev
Olfactory and interoceptive experiences are linguistically expressed in ways that reveal a deep connection between body, culture, and language, with culture-specific strategies for conceptualizing sensory experiences. Comparing natural olfactory judgments with those generated by large language models (LLMs) shows that olfactory experience has high semantic instability and polymorphism, complicating its formalization and automated processing. The methodology identifies parametric differences in lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and stylistic richness of olfactory descriptions. Modern NLP methods open new opportunities for parameterizing phenomenal judgments and studying their structural and cognitive features, offering a toolkit for studying embodied consciousness through computational natural language processing.