Related papers: Bears, all bears, and some bears. Language Constra…

Humans can learn languages from remarkably little experience. Developing computational models that explain this ability has been a major challenge in cognitive science. Bayesian models that build in strong inductive biases - factors that…

Inductive biases are what allow learners to make guesses in the absence of conclusive evidence. These biases have often been studied in cognitive science using concepts or categories -- e.g. by testing how humans generalize a new category…

Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…

Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these…

Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However,…

Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…

Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily…

Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…

Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…

Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of…

While human speakers use a variety of different expressions when describing the same object in an image, giving rise to a distribution of plausible labels driven by pragmatic constraints, the extent to which current Vision & Language Large…

Humans read texts at a varying pace, while machine learning models treat each token in the same way in terms of a computational process. Therefore, we ask, does it help to make models act more like humans? In this paper, we convert this…

A central component of rational behavior is logical inference: the process of determining which conclusions follow from a set of premises. Psychologists have documented several ways in which humans' inferences deviate from the rules of…

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…

Cross-lingual representation learning is an important step in making NLP scale to all the world's languages. Recent work on bilingual lexicon induction suggests that it is possible to learn cross-lingual representations of words based on…

Since language models are used to model a wide variety of languages, it is natural to ask whether the neural architectures used for the task have inductive biases towards modeling particular types of languages. Investigation of these biases…

Given only observational data $X = g(Z)$, where both the latent variables $Z$ and the generating process $g$ are unknown, recovering $Z$ is ill-posed without additional assumptions. Existing methods often assume linearity or rely on…

Deep learning models for semantics are generally evaluated using naturalistic corpora. Adversarial methods, in which models are evaluated on new examples with known semantic properties, have begun to reveal that good performance at these…

All known natural language determiners are conservative. Psycholinguistic experiments indicate that children exhibit a corresponding learnability bias when faced with the task of learning new determiners. However, recent work indicates that…