Related papers: Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the…
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…
This project explores the nature of language acquisition in computers, guided by techniques similar to those used in children. While existing natural language processing methods are limited in scope and understanding, our system aims to…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…
CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold-standard Universal…
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…
Large language models possess general linguistic abilities but acquire language less efficiently than humans. This study proposes a method for integrating the developmental characteristics of working memory during the critical period, a…
This work aims to employ natural language generation (NLG) to rapidly generate items for English language learning applications: this requires both language models capable of generating fluent, high-quality English, and to control the…
The way infants use auditory cues to learn to speak despite the acoustic mismatch of their vocal apparatus is a hot topic of scientific debate. The simulation of early vocal learning using articulatory speech synthesis offers a way towards…
Mobile devices use language models to suggest words and phrases for use in text entry. Traditional language models are based on contextual word frequency in a static corpus of text. However, certain types of phrases, when offered to writers…
A statistical model for segmentation and word discovery in child directed speech is presented. An incremental unsupervised learning algorithm to infer word boundaries based on this model is described and results of empirical tests showing…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an…
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling --…
Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…
Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their…
Goal-oriented dialogue systems face a trade-off between fluent language generation and task-specific control. While supervised learning with large language models is capable of producing realistic text, how to steer such responses towards…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
Recently, object counting has shifted towards class-agnostic counting (CAC), which counts instances of arbitrary object classes never seen during model training. With advancements in robust vision-and-language foundation models, there is a…
Automated speaking assessment in conversation tests (ASAC) aims to evaluate the overall speaking proficiency of an L2 (second-language) speaker in a setting where an interlocutor interacts with one or more candidates. Although prior ASAC…