Related papers: DALL-E 2 Fails to Reliably Capture Common Syntacti…
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and…
Recent work in NLP shows that LSTM language models capture hierarchical structure in language data. In contrast to existing work, we consider the \textit{learning} process that leads to their compositional behavior. For a closer look at how…
Current speech translation systems, while having achieved impressive accuracies, are rather static in their behavior and do not adapt to real-world situations in ways human interpreters do. In order to improve their practical usefulness and…
The capabilities and use cases of automatic natural language processing (NLP) have grown significantly over the last few years. While much work has been devoted to understanding how humans deal with discourse connectives, this phenomenon is…
Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a…
Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…
Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive…
Intelligent systems capable of automatically understanding natural language text are important for many artificial intelligence applications including mobile phone voice assistants, computer vision, and robotics. Understanding language…
The interpretation of implicit meanings is an integral aspect of human communication. However, this framework may not transfer to interactions with Large Language Models (LLMs). To investigate this, we introduce the task of Implicit…
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…
We examine the language capabilities of language models (LMs) from the critical perspective of human language acquisition. Building on classical language development theories, we propose a three-stage framework to assess the abilities of…
This paper reports on the recognition component of an intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help foreign language speakers learn standard English. The system models the grammar of the learner, with this instantiation of the system…
The pursuit of human-like conversational agents has long been guided by the Turing test. For modern speech-to-speech (S2S) systems, a critical yet unanswered question is whether they can converse like humans. To tackle this, we conduct the…
Do state-of-the-art models for language understanding already have, or can they easily learn, abilities such as boolean coordination, quantification, conditionals, comparatives, and monotonicity reasoning (i.e., reasoning about word…
Learning and logic are distinct and remarkable approaches to prediction. Machine learning has experienced a surge in popularity because it is robust to noise and achieves high performance; however, ML experiences many issues with knowledge…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) have become the most desirable starting point in the field of NLP, as they have become remarkably good at solving many individual tasks. Despite such success, in this paper, we argue that current…
This article contains a proposal to add coinduction to the computational apparatus of natural language understanding. This, we argue, will provide a basis for more realistic, computationally sound, and scalable models of natural language…
Natural and artificial audition can in principle acquire different solutions to a given problem. The constraints of the task, however, can nudge the cognitive science and engineering of audition to qualitatively converge, suggesting that a…
The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art…