Human Inspired Progressive Alignment and Comparative Learning for Grounded Word Acquisition

Yuwei Bao, Barrett Martin Lattimer, Joyce Chai

Main: Semantics: Lexical Main-poster Paper

Poster Session 4: Semantics: Lexical (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Poster Session 4 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: compositionality, word embeddings
TLDR: 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 comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated ...
You can open the #paper-P4308 channel in a separate window.
Abstract: 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 comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated a small dataset that enables the computation models to compare the similarities and differences of various attributes, learn to filter out and extract the common information for each shared linguistic label. We frame the acquisition of words as not only the information filtration process, but also as representation-symbol mapping. This procedure does not involve a fixed vocabulary size, nor a discriminative objective, and allows the models to continually learn more concepts efficiently. Our results in controlled experiments have shown the potential of this approach for efficient continual learning of grounded words.