Related papers: A Comparative Investigation of Compositional Synta…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…
Do large language models (LLMs) truly acquire embodied cognition and cultural conventions from text? We introduce demonstratives, fundamental spatial expressions like "this/that" in English and "zh\`e/n\`a" in Chinese, as a novel probe for…
What is sentence meaning and its ideal representation? Much of the expressive power of human language derives from semantic composition, the mind's ability to represent meaning hierarchically & relationally over constituents. At the same…
Language models are known to exhibit various forms of cultural bias in decision-making tasks, yet much less is known about their degree of cultural familiarity in open-ended text generation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the task of…
While mel-spectrograms have been widely utilized as intermediate representations in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), their inherent redundancy leads to inefficiency in learning text-speech alignment. Compact VAE-based latent representations…
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…
Many commonsense reasoning NLP tasks involve choosing between one or more possible answers to a question or prompt based on knowledge that is often implicit. Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on such…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI-based tutoring systems. Can they faithfully model novice reasoning and metacognitive judgments? Existing evaluations emphasize problem-solving accuracy, overlooking the fragmented…
Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g., for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate…
Disfluencies are prevalent in spontaneous speech, as shown in many studies of adult speech. Less is understood about children's speech, especially in pre-school children who are still developing their language skills. We present a novel…
One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the…
End-to-end (E2E) models are becoming increasingly popular for spoken language understanding (SLU) systems and are beginning to achieve competitive performance to pipeline-based approaches. However, recent work has shown that these models…
Current syntactic theory limits the range of grammatical variation so severely that the logical problem of grammar learning is trivial. Yet, children exhibit characteristic stages in syntactic development at least through their sixth year.…
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
Visual imagery does not consist of solitary objects, but instead reflects the composition of a multitude of fluid concepts. While there have been great advances in visual representation learning, such advances have focused on building…
Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this…
Despite the success of neural models in solving reasoning tasks, their compositional generalization capabilities remain unclear. In this work, we propose a new setting of the structured explanation generation task to facilitate…
The ability to abstract, count, and use System~2 reasoning are well-known manifestations of intelligence and understanding. In this paper, we argue, using the example of the ``Look and Say" puzzle, that although deep neural networks can…
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…