2,322 research outputs found
Goldilocks Forgetting in Cross-Situational Learning
Given that there is referential uncertainty (noise) when learning words, to what extent can forgetting filter some of that noise out, and be an aid to learning? Using a Cross Situational Learning model we find a U-shaped function of errors indicative of a "Goldilocks" zone of forgetting: an optimum store-loss ratio that is neither too aggressive nor too weak, but just the right amount to produce better learning outcomes. Forgetting acts as a high-pass filter that actively deletes (part of) the referential ambiguity noise, retains intended referents, and effectively amplifies the signal. The model achieves this performance without incorporating any specific cognitive biases of the type proposed in the constraints and principles account, and without any prescribed developmental changes in the underlying learning mechanism. Instead we interpret the model performance as more of a by-product of exposure to input, where the associative strengths in the lexicon grow as a function of linguistic experience in combination with memory limitations. The result adds a mechanistic explanation for the experimental evidence on spaced learning and, more generally, advocates integrating domain-general aspects of cognition, such as memory, into the language acquisition process
Computational and Robotic Models of Early Language Development: A Review
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and
development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand
better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete
theories of language learning as a complex dynamic system, complementing
traditional methods in psychology and linguistics. We review different modeling
formalisms, grounded in techniques from machine learning and artificial
intelligence such as Bayesian and neural network approaches. We then discuss
their role in understanding several key mechanisms of language development:
cross-situational statistical learning, embodiment, situated social
interaction, intrinsically motivated learning, and cultural evolution. We
conclude by discussing future challenges for research, including modeling of
large-scale empirical data about language acquisition in real-world
environments.
Keywords: Early language learning, Computational and robotic models, machine
learning, development, embodiment, social interaction, intrinsic motivation,
self-organization, dynamical systems, complexity.Comment: to appear in International Handbook on Language Development, ed. J.
Horst and J. von Koss Torkildsen, Routledg
Minimal model of associative learning for cross-situational lexicon acquisition
An explanation for the acquisition of word-object mappings is the associative
learning in a cross-situational scenario. Here we present analytical results of
the performance of a simple associative learning algorithm for acquiring a
one-to-one mapping between objects and words based solely on the
co-occurrence between objects and words. In particular, a learning trial in our
learning scenario consists of the presentation of objects together
with a target word, which refers to one of the objects in the context. We find
that the learning times are distributed exponentially and the learning rates
are given by in the case the target
words are sampled randomly and by in the
case they follow a deterministic presentation sequence. This learning
performance is much superior to those exhibited by humans and more realistic
learning algorithms in cross-situational experiments. We show that introduction
of discrimination limitations using Weber's law and forgetting reduce the
performance of the associative algorithm to the human level
Emerging Artificial Societies Through Learning
The NewTies project is implementing a simulation in which societies of agents are expected to de-velop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve environmental challenges by acting collectively. The challenges are in-tended to be analogous to those faced by early, simple, small-scale human societies. This report on work in progress outlines the major features of the system as it is currently conceived within the project, including the design of the agents, the environment, the mechanism for the evolution of language and the peer-to-peer infrastructure on which the simulation runs.Artificial Societies, Evolution of Language, Decision Trees, Peer-To-Peer Networks, Social Learning
A Linguistically-driven Approach to Cross-Event Damage Assessment of Natural Disasters from Social Media Messages
This work focuses on the analysis of Italian social media messages for disaster management and aims at the detection of messages carrying critical information for the damage assessment task. A main novelty of this study consists in the focus on out-domain and cross-event damage detection, and on the investigation of the most relevant tweet-derived features for these tasks. We devised different experiments by resorting to a wide set of linguistic features qualifying the lexical and grammatical structure of a text as well as ad-hoc features specifically implemented for this task. We investigated the most effective features that allow to achieve the best results. A further result of this study is the construction of the first manually annotated Italian corpus of social media messages for damage assessment
Stochastic Dynamics of Lexicon Learning in an Uncertain and Nonuniform World
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the
meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible
meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most
basic form of cross-situational learning - whereby information from multiple
episodes is combined to eliminate incorrect meanings - can perform badly when
words are learned independently and meanings are drawn from a nonuniform
distribution. If learners further assume that no two words share a common
meaning, we find a phase transition between a maximally-efficient learning
regime, where the learning time is reduced to the shortest it can possibly be,
and a partially-efficient regime where incorrect candidate meanings for words
persist at late times. We obtain exact results for the word-learning process
through an equivalence to a statistical mechanical problem of enumerating loops
in the space of word-meaning mappings.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Version 2 contains additional discussion and will
appear in Phys. Rev. Let
A Bayesian framework for cross-situational word-learning
For infants, early word learning is a chicken-and-egg problem. One way to learn a word is to observe that it co-occurs with a particular referent across different situations. Another way is to use the social context of an utterance to infer the intended referent of a word. Here we present a Bayesian model of cross-situational word learning, and an extension of this model that also learns which social cues are relevant to determining reference. We test our model on a small corpus of mother-infant interaction and find it performs better than competing models. Finally, we show that our model accounts for experimental phenomena including mutual exclusivity, fast-mapping, and generalization from social cues
Acquiring Word-Meaning Mappings for Natural Language Interfaces
This paper focuses on a system, WOLFIE (WOrd Learning From Interpreted
Examples), that acquires a semantic lexicon from a corpus of sentences paired
with semantic representations. The lexicon learned consists of phrases paired
with meaning representations. WOLFIE is part of an integrated system that
learns to transform sentences into representations such as logical database
queries. Experimental results are presented demonstrating WOLFIE's ability to
learn useful lexicons for a database interface in four different natural
languages. The usefulness of the lexicons learned by WOLFIE are compared to
those acquired by a similar system, with results favorable to WOLFIE. A second
set of experiments demonstrates WOLFIE's ability to scale to larger and more
difficult, albeit artificially generated, corpora. In natural language
acquisition, it is difficult to gather the annotated data needed for supervised
learning; however, unannotated data is fairly plentiful. Active learning
methods attempt to select for annotation and training only the most informative
examples, and therefore are potentially very useful in natural language
applications. However, most results to date for active learning have only
considered standard classification tasks. To reduce annotation effort while
maintaining accuracy, we apply active learning to semantic lexicons. We show
that active learning can significantly reduce the number of annotated examples
required to achieve a given level of performance
A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading
Contains fulltext :
226366.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)39 p
- …