Related papers: Stochastic dynamics of lexicon learning in an unce…
Cross-situational word learning, wherein a learner combines information about possible meanings of a word across multiple exposures, has previously been shown to be a very powerful strategy to acquire a large lexicon in a short time.…
Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
Scenarios for the emergence or bootstrap of a lexicon involve the repeated interaction between at least two agents who must reach a consensus on how to name N objects using H words. Here we consider minimal models of two types of learning…
Learning to read words aloud is a major step towards becoming a reader. Many children struggle with the task because of the inconsistencies of English spelling-sound correspondences. Curricula vary enormously in how these patterns are…
Finding a basis matrix (dictionary) by which objective signals are represented sparsely is of major relevance in various scientific and technological fields. We consider a problem to learn a dictionary from a set of training signals. We…
In the present paper we show that distributional information is particularly important when considering concept availability under implicit language learning conditions. Based on results from different behavioural experiments we argue that…
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
Semantic communication aims to convey meaning rather than bit-perfect reproduction, representing a paradigm shift from traditional communication. This paper investigates distribution learning in semantic communication where receivers must…
We propose a segmental neural language model that combines the generalization power of neural networks with the ability to discover word-like units that are latent in unsegmented character sequences. In contrast to previous segmentation…
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Language models generally produce grammatical text, but they are more likely to make errors in certain contexts. Drawing on paradigms from psycholinguistics, we carry out a fine-grained analysis of those errors in different syntactic…
An explanation for the acquisition of word-object mappings is the associative learning in a cross-situational scenario. Here we present analytical results of the performance of a simple associative learning algorithm for acquiring a…
This work initiates a general study of learning and generalization without the i.i.d. assumption, starting from first principles. While the traditional approach to statistical learning theory typically relies on standard assumptions from…
We study a distributed learning process observed in human groups and other social animals. This learning process appears in settings in which each individual in a group is trying to decide over time, in a distributed manner, which option to…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…