相关论文: Talking to Extraordinary Objects: Folktales Offer …
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
What do language models (LMs) do with language? Everyone agrees that they can produce sequences of (mostly) coherent strings of English. But do those sentences mean something, or are LMs simply babbling in a convincing simulacrum of…
Recent years have seen significant market penetration for voice-based personal assistants such as Apple's Siri. However, despite this success, user take-up is frustratingly low. This position paper argues that there is a habitability gap…
Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the potential to be valuable teaching tools, with the potential of giving every student a personalized tutor. However, one challenge with using LLMs to learn new concepts is that when learning a topic…
Cross-language collaborative storytelling plays a vital role in children's language learning and cultural development, fostering both expressive ability and intercultural awareness. Yet, in practice, children's participation is often…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
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…
Thanks to rapid progress in artificial intelligence, we have entered an era when technology and philosophy intersect in interesting ways. Sitting squarely at the centre of this intersection are large language models (LLMs). The more adept…
This paper describes how the current lexical similarity and analogy gold standards are built to conform to certain ideas about what the models they are designed to evaluate are used for. Topical relevance has always been the most important…
Everyday devices like light bulbs and kitchen appliances are now embedded with so many features and automated behaviors that they have become complicated to actually use. While such "smart" capabilities can better support users' goals, the…
Visual Storytelling is a challenging multimodal task between Vision & Language, where the purpose is to generate a story for a stream of images. Its difficulty lies on the fact that the story should be both grounded to the image sequence…
Esoteric programming languages are challenging to learn, but their unusual features and constraints may serve to improve programming ability. From languages designed to be intentionally obtuse (e.g. INTERCAL) to others targeting artistic…
In this essay, I review the importance of languages in the study of reality, following the well-known aphorisms by Galilei, Bohr and many others. The emphasis on these aspects helps us to understand that it is not meaningful to ask if the…
Children can find it challenging to communicate their emotions especially when experiencing mental health challenges. Technological solutions may help children communicate digitally and receive support from one another as advances in…
Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial consortia to fungi -- are increasingly…
Cultural learning is a unique human capacity essential for a wide range of adaptations. Researchers have argued that folktales have the pedagogical function of transmitting the essential information for the environment. The most important…
Sensemaking and narrative are two inherently interconnected concepts about how people understand the world around them. Sensemaking is the process by which people structure and interconnect the information they encounter in the world with…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, have made the problem more approachable. While LLM agents are becoming more widely…