Related papers: The Computational Structure of Unintentional Meani…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
The answers people give when asked to 'think of the unexpected' for everyday event scenarios appear to be more expected than unexpected. There are expected unexpected outcomes that closely adhere to the given information in a scenario,…
Both humans and machines learn the meaning of unknown words through contextual information in a sentence, but not all contexts are equally helpful for learning. We introduce an effective method for capturing the level of contextual…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…
A desideratum of high-quality translation systems is that they preserve meaning, in the sense that two sentences with different meanings should not translate to one and the same sentence in another language. However, state-of-the-art…
Semantic communication focuses on transmitting task-relevant semantic information, aiming for intent-oriented communication. While existing systems improve efficiency by extracting key semantics, they still fail to deeply understand and…
Math is constructed by people for people: just as natural language corpora reflect not just propositions but the communicative goals of language users, the math data that models are trained on reflects not just idealized mathematical…
Most of agents that learn policy for tasks with reinforcement learning (RL) lack the ability to communicate with people, which makes human-agent collaboration challenging. We believe that, in order for RL agents to comprehend utterances…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Speakers communicate to influence their partner's beliefs and shape their actions. Belief- and action-based objectives have been explored independently in recent computational models, but it has been challenging to explicitly compare or…
Text-based measurement in political research often treats classi6ication disagreement as random noise. We examine this assumption using con6idence-weighted human annotations of 5,000 social media messages by U.S. politicians. We 6ind that…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication…
Intent, a critical cognitive notion and mental state, is ubiquitous in human communication and problem-solving. Accurately understanding the underlying intent behind questions is imperative to reasoning towards correct answers. However,…
We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control…
Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in…
The mechanisms of comprehension during language processing remains an open question. Classically, building the meaning of a linguistic utterance is said to be incremental, step-by-step, based on a compositional process. However, many…
Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In…
Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this…