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Predicting Word Learning in Children from the Performance of Computer Vision Systems

Computation and Language 2023-09-12 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

For human children as well as machine learning systems, a key challenge in learning a word is linking the word to the visual phenomena it describes. We explore this aspect of word learning by using the performance of computer vision systems as a proxy for the difficulty of learning a word from visual cues. We show that the age at which children acquire different categories of words is correlated with the performance of visual classification and captioning systems, over and above the expected effects of word frequency. The performance of the computer vision systems is correlated with human judgments of the concreteness of words, which are in turn a predictor of children's word learning, suggesting that these models are capturing the relationship between words and visual phenomena.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.09847,
  title  = {Predicting Word Learning in Children from the Performance of Computer Vision Systems},
  author = {Sunayana Rane and Mira L. Nencheva and Zeyu Wang and Casey Lew-Williams and Olga Russakovsky and Thomas L. Griffiths},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.09847},
  year   = {2023}
}

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CogSci 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:04:47.317Z