Related papers: Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
Current evaluation metrics for language modeling and generation rely heavily on the accuracy of predicted (or generated) words as compared to a reference ground truth. While important, token-level accuracy only captures one aspect of a…
Child Forensic Interviewing (FI) presents a challenge for effective information retrieval and decision making. The high stakes associated with the process demand that expert legal interviewers are able to effectively establish a channel of…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for tutoring, feedback generation, and content creation, but their broad pretraining makes them hard to constrain and poor substitutes for controllable learners. Educational systems often require…
This study investigates how learners organize perceptual space in early phonetic acquisition by advancing previous studies in two key aspects. Firstly, it examines the shape of the learned hidden representation as well as its ability to…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
Studies of discrete languages emerging when neural agents communicate to solve a joint task often look for evidence of compositional structure. This stems for the expectation that such a structure would allow languages to be acquired faster…
We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007).…
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…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of…
Common acquisition functions for active learning use either uncertainty or diversity sampling, aiming to select difficult and diverse data points from the pool of unlabeled data, respectively. In this work, leveraging the best of both…
During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…
An important step in understanding how children acquire languages is studying how infants learn word segmentation. It has been established in previous research that infants may use statistical regularities in speech to learn word…
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…
Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…
Figures of speech help people express abstract concepts and evoke stronger emotions than literal expressions, thereby making texts more creative and engaging. Due to its pervasive and fundamental character, figurative language understanding…
We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…