Related papers: Let's get the student into the driver's seat

Traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. This paradigm seriously hinders the development of task generalization since preparing a task-specific example…

While word embeddings are currently predominant for natural language processing, most of existing models learn them solely from their contexts. However, these context-based word embeddings are limited since not all words' meaning can be…

To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…

Learning another language can be a highly emotional process, typically characterized by numerous frustrations and triumphs, big and small. For most learners, language learning does not follow a linear, predictable path, its zigzag course…

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs…

Curriculum learning is a widely adopted training strategy in natural language processing (NLP), where models are exposed to examples organized by increasing difficulty to enhance learning efficiency and performance. However, most existing…

The human's cognitive capacity for problem solving is always limited to his/her educational background, skills, experiences, etc. Hence, it is often insufficient to bring solution to extraordinary problems especially when there is a time…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…

The striking recent advances in eliciting seemingly meaningful language behaviour from language-only machine learning models have only made more apparent, through the surfacing of clear limitations, the need to go beyond the language-only…

The pruning objective has recently extended beyond accuracy and sparsity to robustness in language models. Despite this, existing methods struggle to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks when continually increasing model sparsity…

Humans can learn languages from remarkably little experience. Developing computational models that explain this ability has been a major challenge in cognitive science. Bayesian models that build in strong inductive biases - factors that…

Design of dialogue systems has witnessed many advances lately, yet acquiring huge set of data remains an hindrance to their fast development for a new task or language. Besides, training interactive systems with batch data is not…

This paper documents a year-long experiment to "profile" the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added…

Word embeddings are a fixed, distributional representation of the context of words in a corpus learned from word co-occurrences. While word embeddings have proven to have many practical uses in natural language processing tasks, they…

Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…

Learning intents and slot labels from user utterances is a fundamental step in all spoken language understanding (SLU) and dialog systems. State-of-the-art neural network based methods, after deployment, often suffer from performance…

Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

This paper evaluates existing and newly proposed answer selection methods based on pre-trained word embeddings. Word embeddings are highly effective in various natural language processing tasks and their integration into traditional…

Some researchers claim that language acquisition is critically dependent on experiencing linguistic input in order of increasing complexity. We set out to test this hypothesis using a simple recurrent neural network (SRN) trained to predict…

Recent developments in deep learning have led to a significant innovation in various classic and practical subjects, including speech recognition, computer vision, question answering, information retrieval and so on. In the context of…