Related papers: Word learning under infinite uncertainty

How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…

The structure of curriculum plays a vital role in our learning process, both as children and adults. Presenting material in ascending order of difficulty that also exploits prior knowledge can have a significant impact on the rate of…

Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…

In safety-critical applications, language models should be able to characterize their uncertainty with meaningful probabilities. Many uncertainty quantification approaches require supervised data; however, finding suitable unseen…

Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…

Uncertainty quantification has received increasing attention in machine learning in the recent past. In particular, a distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has been found useful in this regard. The latter refers to the…

We consider decision problems under uncertainty where the options available to a decision maker and the resulting outcome are related through a causal mechanism which is unknown to the decision maker. We ask how a decision maker can learn…

Due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications, many of which are coming with safety requirements, the notion of uncertainty has received increasing attention in machine learning research in the last…

Learning, whether natural or artificial, is a process of selection. It starts with a set of candidate options and selects the more successful ones. In the case of machine learning the selection is done based on empirical estimates of…

This work is a study of the impact of multiple aspects in a classic unsupervised word sense disambiguation algorithm. We identify relevant factors in a decision rule algorithm, including the initial labeling of examples, the formalization…

Given only observational data $X = g(Z)$, where both the latent variables $Z$ and the generating process $g$ are unknown, recovering $Z$ is ill-posed without additional assumptions. Existing methods often assume linearity or rely on…

One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…

Structured prediction is ubiquitous in applications of machine learning such as knowledge extraction and natural language processing. Structure often can be formulated in terms of logical constraints. We consider the question of how to…

Word order is an important concept in natural language, and in this work, we study how word order affects the induction of world knowledge from raw text using language models. We use word analogies to probe for such knowledge. Specifically,…

The problem of designing learners that provide guarantees that their predictions are provably correct is of increasing importance in machine learning. However, learning theoretic guarantees have only been considered in very specific…

Word sense disambiguation (WSD), which aims to determine an appropriate sense for a target word given its context, is crucial for natural language understanding. Existing supervised methods treat WSD as a classification task and have…

Decision Focused Learning has emerged as a critical paradigm for integrating machine learning with downstream optimisation. Despite its promise, existing methodologies predominantly rely on probabilistic models and focus narrowly on task…

Automated decision-making systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, which creates an immediate need for their interpretability and explainability. However, it remains unclear whether users know what insights an explanation offers and,…

Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…