Related papers: Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described…
The substantial growth of online learning, in particular, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supports research into the development of better models for effective learning. Learner 'confusion' is among one of the identified aspects…
Children in a large number of international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US learn and speak more than one language. However, parents often struggle to acquaint their young children with their local language if the child…
Despite significant research effort in the development of automatic dialogue evaluation metrics, little thought is given to evaluating dialogues other than in English. At the same time, ensuring metrics are invariant to semantically similar…
Pre-trained language models are effective in a variety of natural language tasks, but it has been argued their capabilities fall short of fully learning meaning or understanding language. To understand the extent to which language models…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…
Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Prompt engineering is widely used to shape large language model behavior, yet it is often treated as a practical heuristic rather than as a form of natural-language control. This paper develops a cognitive-semantic account in which prompts…
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…
A range of studies have concluded that neural word prediction models can distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences with high accuracy. However, these studies are based primarily on monolingual evidence from English. To…
We present a preview of the Syntactic Acceptability Dataset, a resource being designed for both syntax and computational linguistics research. In its current form, the dataset comprises 1,000 English sequences from the syntactic discourse:…
Developmental psychologists have argued about when cognitive capacities such as language understanding or theory of mind emerge. These debates often hinge on the concept of "task demands" -- the auxiliary challenges associated with…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable fluency and competence across various natural language tasks. However, recent research has highlighted their sensitivity to variations in input prompts. To deploy LLMs in a safe and reliable…
Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) has been exploited immensely for learning latent representations in various fields. This study takes a step further by demonstrating the potential of CCA in identifying Elementary Discourse Units(EDUs)…
We introduce Generative Spoken Language Modeling, the task of learning the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language from raw audio (no text, no labels), and a set of metrics to automatically evaluate the learned representations…
This paper investigates the temporal excitation patterns of creaky voice. Creaky voice is a voice quality frequently used as a phrase-boundary marker, but also as a means of portraying attitude, affective states and even social status.…
Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…
This paper presents a novel speaking-style captioning method that generates diverse descriptions while accurately predicting speaking-style information. Conventional learning criteria directly use original captions that contain not only…