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This paper explores how natural-language descriptions of formal languages can be compared to their formal representations and how semantic differences can be explained. This is motivated from educational scenarios where learners describe a…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a core task in most human-machine interaction systems. With the emergence of smart homes, smart phones and smart speakers, SLU has become a key technology for the industry. In a classical SLU approach,…
Languages typically provide more than one grammatical construction to express certain types of messages. A speaker's choice of construction is known to depend on multiple factors, including the choice of main verb -- a phenomenon known as…
Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…
Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…
For the complex human brain that enables us to communicate in natural language, we gathered good understandings of principles underlying language acquisition and processing, knowledge about socio-cultural conditions, and insights about…
A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in the…
Building on research arguing for the possibility of conceptual and categorical knowledge acquisition through statistics contained in language, we evaluate predictive language models (LMs) -- informed solely by textual input -- on a…
Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, have made the problem more approachable. While LLM agents are becoming more widely…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
Without explicit feedback, humans can rapidly learn the meaning of words. Children can acquire a new word after just a few passive exposures, a process known as fast mapping. This word learning capability is believed to be the most…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across a myriad of tasks, yet they occasionally yield undesirable outputs. We posit that these limitations are rooted in the foundational autoregressive architecture of…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes on various tasks. However, recent studies have found that there are still significant challenges to the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs, which can be categorized into the…
Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…
Language models can store vast factual knowledge, yet their ability to flexibly use this knowledge for downstream tasks (e.g., via instruction finetuning) remains questionable. This paper investigates four fundamental knowledge manipulation…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
Neural models excel at extracting statistical patterns from large amounts of data, but struggle to learn patterns or reason about language from only a few examples. In this paper, we ask: Can we learn explicit rules that generalize well…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…
The ability to learn and compose functions is foundational to efficient learning and reasoning in humans, enabling flexible generalizations such as creating new dishes from known cooking processes. Beyond sequential chaining of functions,…