Related papers: Unsupervised Language Acquisition: Theory and Prac…
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based…
We present an unsupervised learning algorithm that acquires a natural-language lexicon from raw speech. The algorithm is based on the optimal encoding of symbol sequences in an MDL framework, and uses a hierarchical representation of…
This article presents experiments performed using a computational laboratory environment for language acquisition experiments. It implements a multi-agent system consisting of two agents: an adult language model and a daughter language…
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…
We consider the problem of fully unsupervised learning of grammatical (part-of-speech) categories from unlabeled text. The standard maximum-likelihood hidden Markov model for this task performs poorly, because of its weak inductive bias and…
Words unknown to the lexicon present a substantial problem to part-of-speech tagging. In this paper we present a technique for fully unsupervised statistical acquisition of rules which guess possible parts-of-speech for unknown words. Three…
We describe an incremental unsupervised procedure to learn words from transcribed continuous speech. The algorithm is based on a conservative and traditional statistical model, and results of empirical tests show that it is competitive with…
How can children acquire native-level syntax from limited input? According to the Poverty of the Stimulus Hypothesis (PoSH), the linguistic input children receive is insufficient to explain certain generalizations that are robustly learned;…
An ability that underlies human syntactic knowledge is determining which words can appear in the similar structures (i.e. grouping words by their syntactic categories). These groupings enable humans to combine structures in order to…
Recently, unsupervised pre-training is gaining increasing popularity in the realm of computational linguistics, thanks to its surprising success in advancing natural language understanding (NLU) and the potential to effectively exploit…
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…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
As humans, we often rely on language to learn language. For example, when corrected in a conversation, we may learn from that correction, over time improving our language fluency. Inspired by this observation, we propose a learning…
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…
Subword modeling for zero-resource languages aims to learn low-level representations of speech audio without using transcriptions or other resources from the target language (such as text corpora or pronunciation dictionaries). A good…
We present a novel incremental learning approach for unsupervised word segmentation that combines features from probabilistic modeling and model selection. This includes super-additive penalties for addressing the cognitive burden imposed…
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…
Prompting inputs with natural language task descriptions has emerged as a popular mechanism to elicit reasonably accurate outputs from large-scale generative language models with little to no in-context supervision. This also helps gain…
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a…
Language segmentation consists in finding the boundaries where one language ends and another language begins in a text written in more than one language. This is important for all natural language processing tasks. The problem can be solved…