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Recent advances in large-scale pre-training provide large models with the potential to learn knowledge from the raw text. It is thus natural to ask whether it is possible to leverage these large models as knowledge bases for downstream…
Many contextualized word representations are now learned by intricate neural network models, such as masked neural language models (MNLMs) which are made up of huge neural network structures and trained to restore the masked text. Such…
We introduce a new dataset for training and evaluating grounded language models. Our data is collected within a virtual reality environment and is designed to emulate the quality of language data to which a pre-verbal child is likely to…
A robot's ability to understand or ground natural language instructions is fundamentally tied to its knowledge about the surrounding world. We present an approach to grounding natural language utterances in the context of factual…
Distributional semantic models capture word-level meaning that is useful in many natural language processing tasks and have even been shown to capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. The majority of these models are purely text based,…
Spatial reasoning based on natural language expressions is essential for everyday human tasks. This reasoning ability is also crucial for machines to interact with their environment in a human-like manner. However, recent research shows…
Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. Nowadays, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. However, it remains under-explored whether PLMs can interpret…
Pre-trained language models are effective in a variety of natural language tasks, but it has been argued their capabilities fall short of fully learning meaning or understanding language. To understand the extent to which language models…
Prompt-based probing has been widely used in evaluating the abilities of pretrained language models (PLMs). Unfortunately, recent studies have discovered such an evaluation may be inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable. Furthermore, the…
Language models trained on billions of tokens have recently led to unprecedented results on many NLP tasks. This success raises the question of whether, in principle, a system can ever ``understand'' raw text without access to some form of…
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…
Scientific feasibility assessment asks whether a claim is consistent with established knowledge and whether experimental evidence could support or refute it. We frame feasibility assessment as a diagnostic reasoning task in which, given a…
Combining the visual modality with pretrained language models has been surprisingly effective for simple descriptive tasks such as image captioning. More general text generation however remains elusive. We take a step back and ask: How do…
Models of language trained on very large corpora have been demonstrated useful for NLP. As fixed artifacts, they have become the object of intense study, with many researchers "probing" the extent to which linguistic abstractions, factual…
Despite advances in language modelling, distributional methods that build semantic representations from co-occurrences fail to discriminate between plausible and implausible events. In this work, we investigate how plausibility prediction…
Modern neural language models (LMs) are powerful tools for modeling human sentence production and comprehension, and their internal representations are remarkably well-aligned with representations of language in the human brain. But to…
The relationship between communicated language and intended meaning is often probabilistic and sensitive to context. Numerous strategies attempt to estimate such a mapping, often leveraging recursive Bayesian models of communication. In…
A central goal of cognitive modeling is to develop models that not only predict human behavior but also provide insight into the underlying cognitive mechanisms. While neural network models trained on large-scale behavioral data often…
Recent zero-shot evaluations have highlighted important limitations in the abilities of language models (LMs) to perform meaning extraction. However, it is now well known that LMs can demonstrate radical improvements in the presence of…
Data-driven sensor interpretation in autonomous driving can lead to highly implausible predictions as can most of the time be verified with common-sense knowledge. However, learning common knowledge only from data is hard and approaches for…