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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…

The minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a…

Most positive and unlabeled data is subject to selection biases. The labeled examples can, for example, be selected from the positive set because they are easier to obtain or more obviously positive. This paper investigates how learning can…

Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variability across words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-based…

A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word…

The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity. Prior work capitalizes on information theory to formalize these notions; however, these studies generally rely on…

Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents has been taken to reflect a bias toward mutual exclusivity. This tendency may be advantageous both as (1) an ad-hoc referent selection heuristic to single out referents…

Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…

Feature selection is one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning. An extensive body of work on information-theoretic feature selection exists which is based on maximizing mutual information between subsets of features and class…

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.…

Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the…

Following the recent success of word embeddings, it has been argued that there is no such thing as an ideal representation for words, as different models tend to capture divergent and often mutually incompatible aspects like…

Selective rationalization improves neural network interpretability by identifying a small subset of input features -- the rationale -- that best explains or supports the prediction. A typical rationalization criterion, i.e. maximum mutual…

Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…

Concept induction requires the extraction and naming of concepts from noisy perceptual experience. For supervised approaches, as the number of concepts grows, so does the number of required training examples. Philosophers, psychologists,…

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. To automatically identify biased language, we present an exploratory approach that compares the context of related…

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…

We are interested in learning data-driven representations that can generalize well, even when trained on inherently biased data. In particular, we face the case where some attributes (bias) of the data, if learned by the model, can severely…

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…