Related papers: Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
Understanding the neural basis of language comprehension in the brain has been a long-standing goal of various scientific research programs. Recent advances in language modelling and in neuroimaging methodology promise potential…
Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning,…
Child-directed speech (CDS) is a particular type of speech that adults use when addressing young children. Its properties also change as a function of extralinguistic factors, such as age of the child being addressed. Access to large…
Distributional semantics offers new ways to study the semantics of morphology. This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their plural inflectional variants in English. Our goal is to compare two models for the…
Confidence estimation (CE) indicates how reliable the answers of large language models are and impacts user trust and decision-making. Existing evaluations mainly concern the alignment between confidence and correctness, but ignore the…
We present a low-compute non-generative system for implementing interview-style conversational agents which can be used to facilitate qualitative data collection through controlled interactions and quantitative analysis. Use cases include…
Agents that negotiate with humans find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. Most efforts in human-agent negotiations rely on restrictive menu-driven interfaces for communication. To advance the research in language-based…
With the success of contextualized language models, much research explores what these models really learn and in which cases they still fail. Most of this work focuses on specific NLP tasks and on the learning outcome. Little research has…
Generative models are a popular choice for adult-to-adult voice conversion (VC) because of their efficient way of modelling unlabelled data. To this point their usefulness in producing children speech and in particular adult to child VC has…
Though generative dialogue modeling is widely seen as a language modeling task, the task demands an agent to have a complex natural language understanding of its input text to carry a meaningful interaction with an user. The automatic…
In this paper we explain how contextual expectations are generated and used in the task-oriented spoken language understanding system Dialogos. The hard task of recognizing spontaneous speech on the telephone may greatly benefit from the…
With a lot of work about context-free question answering systems, there is an emerging trend of conversational question answering models in the natural language processing field. Thanks to the recently collected datasets, including QuAC and…
We define general linguistic intelligence as the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge about a language's lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic conventions to adapt to new tasks quickly. Using this definition, we analyze…
Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language…
We examine the language capabilities of language models (LMs) from the critical perspective of human language acquisition. Building on classical language development theories, we propose a three-stage framework to assess the abilities of…
Figurative language generation is the task of reformulating a given text in the desired figure of speech while still being faithful to the original context. We take the first step towards multi-figurative language modelling by providing a…
Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first…
Language models have demonstrated the ability to generate highly fluent text; however, it remains unclear whether their output retains coherent high-level structure (e.g., story progression). Here, we propose to apply a statistical tool,…