Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Some thoughts on Morley 2015

I definitely appreciate the detailed thought that went into this paper — Morley uses this deceptively simple case study to highlight how to take complexity in representation and acquisition seriously, and also how to take arguments about Universal Grammar seriously. (Both of these are, of course, near and dear to my heart.) I also loved the appeal to use computational modeling to make linguistic theories explicit. (I am all about that.)

I also liked how she notes the distinction between learning mechanism and hypothesis space constraints in her discussion of how UG might be instantiated — again, something near and dear to my heart. My understanding is that we’ve typically thought about UG as constraints on the hypothesis space (and the particular UG instantiation Morley investigated is this kind of UG constraint). To be fair, I tend to lean this way myself, preferring domain-general mechanisms for navigating the hypothesis space and UG for defining the hypothesis space in some useful way. 

Turning to the particular UG instantiation Morley looks at, I do find it interesting that she contrasts the “UG-delimited H Principle” with the “cycle of language change and language acquisition” (Intro). To me, the latter could definitely have a UG component in either the hypothesis space definition or the learning mechanism. So I guess it goes to show the importance of being particular about the UG claim you’re investigating. If the UG-delimited H Principle isn’t necessary, that just rules out the logical necessity of that type of UG component rather than all UG components. (I feel like this is the same point made to some extent in the Ambridge et al. 2014 and Pearl 2014 discussion about identifying/needing UG.)


Some other thoughts:
(1) Case Study: 

(a)  I love seeing the previous argument for “poverty of the typology implies UG” laid out. Once you see the pieces that lead to the conclusion, it becomes much easier to evaluate each component in its own right.

(b) The hypothetical lexicon items in Table 1 provide a beautiful example of overlapping hypothesis extensions, some of which are in a subset-superset relationship depending on the actual lexical items observed (I’m thinking of the Penultimate grammar vs the other two, given items 1,3, and 4 or item 1, 2, and 5). Bayesian Size Principle to the rescue (potentially)!

(c) For stress grammars, I definitely agree that some sort of threshold for determining whether a rule should be posited is necessary. I’m fond of Legate & Yang (2013)/Yang (2005)’s Tolerance Principle myself (see Pearl, Ho, & Detrano 2014, 2015 for how we implement it for English stress. Basic idea: this principle provides a concrete threshold for which patterns are the productive ones. Then, the learner can use those to pick the productive grammar from the available hypotheses). I was delighted to see the Tolerance Principle proposal explicitly discussed in section 5.


(2) The Learner

(a) It’s interesting that a distribution over lexical item stress patterns is allowed, which would then imply that a distribution over grammars is allowed (this seems right to me intuitively when you have both productive and non-productive patterns that are predictable). Then, the “core” grammar is simply the one with the highest probability. One sticky thing: Would this predict variability within a single lexical item? (That is, sometimes an item gets the stress contour from grammar 1 and sometimes it gets the one from grammar 2.) If so, that’s a bit weird, except in cases of code-switching within dialects (maybe example: American vs. British pronunciation). But is this what Stochastic OT predicts? It sounds like the other frameworks mentioned could be interpreted this way too. I’m most familiar with Yang’s Variational Learning (VL), but I’m not sure the VL framework has been applied to stress patterns on individual lexical items, and perhaps the sticky issue mentioned above is why? 

Following this up with the general learners described, I think that’s sort of what the Variability/Mixture learners would predict, since grammars can just randomly fail to apply to a given lexical item with some probability. This is then a bit funny because these are the only two general learners pursued further. The discarded learners predict different-sized subclasses of lexical items within which a given grammar applies absolutely, and that seems much more plausible to me, given my knowledge of English stress. Except the description of the hypotheses given later on in example (5) make me think this is effectively how the Mixture model is being applied? But then the text beneath (7) clarifies that, no, this hypothesis really does allow the same lexical item to show up with different stress patterns.

(b) It’s really interesting to see the connection between descriptive and explanatory adequacy and Bayesian likelihood and prior. I immediately got the descriptive-likelihood link, but goggled for a moment at the explanatory-prior link. Isn’t explanatory adequacy about generalization? Ah, but a prior can be thought of as an extension of items -- and so the items included in that extension are ones the hypothesis would generalize to. Nice!

(3)  Likely Input and a Reasonable Learner: The take-home point seems to be that lexicons that support Gujarati* are rare, but not impossible. I wonder how well these match up to the distributions we see in child-directed speech (CDS)? Is CDS more like Degree 4, which seems closest to the Zipfian distribution we tend to see in language at different levels?

(4) Interpretation of Results: I think Morley makes a really striking point about how much we actually (don’t) know about typological diversity, given the sample available to us (basically, we have 0.02% of all the languages). It really makes you (me) rethink making claims based on typology.

References

Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E. V. (2014). Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help. Language, 90(3), e53-e90.

Pearl, L. (2014). Evaluating learning-strategy components: Being fair (Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven). Language, 90(3), e107-e114.

Pearl, L., Ho, T., & Detrano, Z. 2014. More learnable than thou? Testing metrical phonology representations with child-directed speech. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 398-422.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Some thoughts on Pietroski 2015 in press

One of the things that stood out most to me from this article is the importance of the link between structured sequences and intended meanings (e.g., with the eager/easy to please examples). Pietroski is very clear about this point (which makes sense, as it was one of the main criticisms of the Perfors et al. 2011 work that attempted to investigate poverty of the stimulus for the canonical example of complex yes/no questions). Anyway, the idea that comes through is that it’s not enough to just deal with surface strings alone. Presumably it becomes more acceptable if the strings also include latent structure, though, like traces? (Ex: John is easy to please __(John) vs. John is eager (__John) to please.) At that point, some of the meaning is represented in the string directly.

I’m not sure how many syntactic acquisition models deal with the integration of this kind of meaning information, though. For example, my islands model with Jon Sprouse (Pearl & Sprouse 2013) used latent phrasal structure (IP, VP, CP, etc) to augment the learner’s representation of the input, but was still just trying to assign acceptability (=probability) to structures irrespective of the meanings they had. That is, no meaning component was included. Of course, this is why we focused on islands that were supposed to be solely “syntactic”, unlike, for instance, factive islands that are thought to incorporate semantic components. (Quickie factive island example: *Who do you forget likes this book? vs. Who do you believe likes this book?). Is our approach an exceptional case, though? That is, is it never appropriate to worry only about the “formatives” (i.e., the structures in absence of interpretation)? For instance, what if we think of the learning problem as trying to decide what formative is the appropriate way to express a particular interpretation — isn’t identifying the correct formative alone sufficient in this case? Concrete example: Preferring “Was the hiker who was lost killed in the fire?” over “*Was the hiker who lost was killed in the fire?” with the interpretation of "The hiker who was lost was killed in the fire [ask this]".

Some other thoughts:

(1) My interpretation of the opening quote is that acquisition models (as theories of language learning and/or grammar construction) matter for theories of language representation because they facilitate the clear formulation of deeper representational questions. (Presumably by highlighting more concretely what works and doesn’t work from a learning perspective?) As an acquisition chick who cares about representation, this makes me happy.


(2) For me, the discussion about children’s “vocabulary” that allows them to go from “parochial courses of human experience to particular languages” is another way of talking about the filters children have on how they perceive the input and the inductive biases they have on their hypothesis spaces. This makes perfect sense to me, though I wouldn’t have made the link to the term “vocabulary” before this. Relatedly, the gruesome example walkthrough really highlights for me the importance of inductive biases in the hypothesis space. For example, take the assumption of constancy w.r.t. time for what (most) words mean (so we never get green before time t or blue after time t as possible meanings, even though these are logically possible given the bits we build meaning out of). So we get that more exotic example, which gets followed up with more familiar linguistic examples that help drive the point home.

References:
Pearl, L., & Sprouse, J. (2013). Syntactic islands and learning biases: Combining experimental syntax and computational modeling to investigate the language acquisition problem. Language Acquisition20(1), 23-68.

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Regier, T. (2011). The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition118(3), 306-338.



Monday, October 19, 2015

Some thoughts on Braginsky et al. 2015

One of the things I quite like about this paper is that it’s a really nice example of what you can do with observational data (like the CDI data), though of course there are still the standard limitations on the accuracy of caretaker reports, the fact that you’re getting at production (in this case) rather than comprehension so we’re seeing a time delay w.r.t. when the knowledge is acquired by the child, etc. 

Also, how nice to see a study with this many subjects! I think this size subject pool is more standard in medical studies, but it’s really rare that we’ve seen this size for language acquisition studies. This means that when we find trends, we can be more sure it’s not just a fluke of the sample.

The question from the modeler’s perspective then becomes “What can we do with this?” Certainly this provides an empirical checkpoint in multiple languages for specific details about the development trajectory. So, I think this makes it good behavioral data for models of syntactic development (e.g., MOSAIC by Freudenthal & colleagues: Freudenthal et al. 2007, 2009; Variational learning: Yang 2004, Legate & Yang 2007) and models of vocabulary development (e.g., the model of McMurray & colleagues: McMurray 2007, Mitchell & McMurray 2009, McMurray et al. 2012) to try and match their outputs against. Especially good is the differences across languages - these are the kind of nuances that may distinguish models from each other. Perhaps even more interesting would be an attempt to build a joint model that combines promising syntactic development and vocabulary development models together so that you can look for the correlational data this large-scale observational study provides.


Some more targeted thoughts:
(1) The methodology advance of wordbank.stanford.edu pleases me no end — I think this kind of aggregation approach is the way forward. Once you can aggregate data sets of this size, you can find things that you can feel more confident about as a scientist. So, the finding that there are age effects on syntax (less so on morphology) and on function words (less so on nouns) is something that people will take notice of.

(2) Analysis 1: I wonder how much of an effect the linguistic properties of these languages has (ex: Spanish, Norwegian, and Dutch are morphologically much richer than English). It would be nice to see some sort of quantitative measure of the morphological richness, and maybe other potentially relevant cross-linguistic factors. A related thought: Are there any useful/explanatory cross-linguistic differences in the actual items in the Complexity (Morphological & Syntactic) items?


(3) Analysis 2,  Figure 4: There’s an interesting difference in early Spanish where predicates lag behind function words until the vocabulary size =~ 0.4. Presumably this is something due to the language itself, and the items in the predicates vs. function words categories? It’s notable that Spanish is also the only language where predicates don’t seem to have an age effect coefficient (see Figure 5) - so predicate development is totally predictable from the child’s vocabulary development. Also, Figure 5 shows Danish with a big age effect for Nouns — does this have to do with the particular nouns, I wonder? Or something about Danish nouns in general?

~~~
References:

Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Aguado‐Orea, J., & Gobet, F. (2007). Modeling the developmental patterning of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German, and Spanish using MOSAIC. Cognitive Science31(2), 311-341.

Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2009). Simulating the referential properties of Dutch, German, and English root infinitives in MOSAIC. Language Learning and Development5(1), 1-29.

Legate, J. A., & Yang, C. (2007). Morphosyntactic learning and the development of tense. Language Acquisition14(3), 315-344.

McMurray, B. (2007). Defusing the childhood vocabulary explosion. Science317(5838), 631-631.

McMurray, B., Horst, J. S., & Samuelson, L. K. (2012). Word learning emerges from the interaction of online referent selection and slow associative learning. Psychological review119(4), 831.

Mitchell, C., & McMurray, B. (2009). On leveraged learning in lexical acquisition and its relationship to acceleration. Cognitive Science33(8), 1503-1523.

Yang, C. D. (2004). Universal Grammar, statistics or both?. Trends in cognitive sciences8(10), 451-456.


Monday, October 5, 2015

Tenure-track Assistant Professor, Language Science @ UCI

The Program in Language Science (http://linguistics.uci.edu) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is seeking applicants for a tenure-track assistant professor faculty position. We seek candidates who combine a strong background in theoretical linguistics and a research focus in one of its sub-areas with computational, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, or logical approaches.
The successful candidate will interact with a dynamic and growing community in language, speech, and hearing sciences within the Program, the Center for Language Science, the Department of Cognitive Sciences, the Department of Logic and the Philosophy of Science, the Center for the Advancement of Logic, its Philosophy, History, and Applications, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience & Engineering, and the Center for Hearing Research. Individuals whose interests mesh with those of the current faculty and who will contribute to the university's active role in interdisciplinary research and teaching initiatives will be given preference.
Interested candidates should apply online at https://recruit.ap.uci.edu/apply/JPF03107 with a cover letter indicating primary research and teaching interests, CV, three recent publications, three letters of recommendation, and a statement on previous and/or past contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Application review will commence on November 20, 2015, and continue until the position is filled.
The University of California, Irvine is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.

Some thoughts on Meylan & Griffiths 2015

I really enjoyed seeing this extension of a reasonable existing word-learning model (which was focused on concrete nouns) to something that tries to capture more of the complexity of word meaning learning. I admit I was surprised to find out that the extension was on the semantics side (compositional meanings) rather than some sort of syntactic bootstrapping (using surrounding word contexts), especially given their opening example. Given the extensive syntactic bootstrapping experimental literature, I think a really cool extension would be to incorporate the idea that words appearing in similar distributional contexts have similar meanings. Maybe this requires a more sophisticated “meaning” hypothesis space, though? 

I also appreciated seeing the empirical predictions resulting from their model (good modeling practices, check!). More specifically, they talk about why their model does better with a staged input representation, and suggest that learning from one, then two, then three words would lead to the same result as learning from three, then two, then one word (which is not so intuitive, and therefore an interesting prediction). To be honest however, I didn’t quite follow the nitty-gritty details of why that should be, so that’s worth hashing out together.


More specific thoughts:
(1) The learners here have the assumption that a word refers to a subset of world-states, and that presumably could be quite large (infinite even) if we’re talking about all possible combinations of objects, properties, and actions, etc. So this means the learner needs to have some restrictions on the possible components of the world-states. I think that’s pretty reasonable — we know from experimental studies that children have conceptual biases, and so probably also have equivalent perceptual biases that filter down the set of possible world-states in the hypothesis space.

(2) The “wag” example walk-through: I’m not sure I understand exactly how the likelihood works here. “Wag” refers to side-to-side motion. If the learner thinks “wag” refers to side-to-side motion + filled/black shading, this is described as being “consistent with the observed data”.  But what about the instances of “wag” occurring with non-filled items (du ri wag, pu ri wag) - these aren’t consistent with that hypothesis. So shouldn’t the likelihood of generating those data, given this hypothesis, be 0? M&G2015 also note for this case that “the likelihood is relatively low in that the hypothesis picks out a larger number of world-states”. But isn’t side-to-side+black/filled compatible with fewer world-states than side-to-side alone?

(3) I like the incorporation of memory noise (which makes this simulation more cognitively plausible). Certainly the unintentional swapping of a word is one way to to implement memory noise that doesn’t require messing with the guts of the Bayesian model (it’s basically an update to the input the model gets). I wonder what would happen if we messed with the internal knowledge representation instead (or in addition to this) and let the learned mappings degrade over time. I could imagine implementing that as some kind of fuzzy sampling of the probabilities associated with the mappings between word and world-state.

(4) Figure 3, with the adult artificial learning results from Kertsen & Earles 2001: Adults are best at object or path mapping, and are much worse at manner mapping. My guess is that has to do with the English bias for manner-of-motion encoded in verbs over direction-of-motion (which happens to be the opposite of the Spanish bias). So, these results could come from a transfer effect from the English L1 — in essence, due to their L1 bias, it doesn’t occur to the English subjects to encode the manner as a separate word from the verb-y/action-y type word. Given what we know about the development of these language-specific verb biases, this may not be present in the same way in children learning their initial language (e.g., there’s some evidence that all kids come predisposed for direction-of-motion encoding — Maguire et al. 2010.)  At any rate, it seems easy enough to build in a salience bias for one type of world-state - just weight the prior accordingly. At the moment, the model doesn’t show same manner deficit and so this could be an empirically-grounded bias to add to the model to account for those behavioral results.

Maguire, M. J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Imai, M., Haryu, E., Vanegas, S., Okada, H., Pulverman, R., & Sanchez-Davis, B. (2010). A developmental shift from similar to language-specific strategies in verb acquisition: A comparison of English, Spanish, and Japanese. Cognition, 114(3), 299-319. 

(5) Also Figure 3:  I’m not sure what to make of the model comparison with human behavior.  I agree that there’s a qualitative match with respect to improvement for staged exposure over full exposure. Other than that? Maybe the percent correct if averaged (sort of) for eta = 0.25. I guess the real question is how well the model is supposed to match the adult behavior. (That is, maybe I’m being too exacting in my expectations for the output behavior of the model, given what it has built into it.)

(6)  Simulation 3 setup: I didn’t quite follow this. Is the idea that the utterance is paired with four world-states, and the learner assumes the utterance refers to one of them? If so, what does this map to in a realistic acquisition scenario?  Having more conceptual mappings possible? In general, I think the page limit forced the authors to cut the description of this simulation short, which makes it tricky to understand.


Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Next time on 10/7/15 @ 3pm in SBSG 2221 = Meylan & Griffiths 2015

It looks like a good collective time to meet will be Wednesdays at 3pm for this quarter, so that's what we'll plan on.  Our first meeting will be on Oct 7 in SBSG 2221, and our complete schedule is available on the webpage at 


On October 7, we'll be discussing an article that extends an existing state-of-the-art model of concrete word learning to be able to leverage input in a more realistic way.

Meylan, S. C., & Griffiths, T. L. 2015. A Bayesian Framework for Learning Words From Multiword Utterances. In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.


See you October 7!

Friday, June 5, 2015

Some thoughts on Kao et al. 2014

This work strikes me as a nice demonstration of the Rational Speech Act model framework, extended to allow multiple dimensions of communicative goals (in this case, true state of the world vs. affective content vs. both). Beyond the formalization of these components in the RSA model, the key seems to be that the listener must know that both communicative goals are possible. This got me thinking about how to apply the RSA model to child language processing — for example, would a model that only had the true state of the world as its sole communicative goal match children’s interpretations better at a certain point in development? It seems possible. And then, we could track development by when this second communicative goal seems to be taken into consideration (i.e., does the RSA model+affect fit the behavioral data better than the basic RSA model), and potentially how much weight it’s given a priori.

A related thought occurred to me as I was reading the implementation details of the RSA model. The basic framework is that you have a listener, and the listener assumes the speaker generated the utterance by keeping in mind how a literal listener would interpret it. This clearly involves some pretty sophisticated theory of mind (ToM). So, similar to the above, could we track children’s development by how well this model fits their behavior vs. a model where the listener assumes a speaker who deviates from the above in some way (e.g., a speaker who has the same knowledge as the listener, rather than a speaker who thinks about how a naive literal listener will interpret the utterance)? To be honest, I really don’t know how to cash this out exactly, but the intuition feels right to me. Kids may have various kinds of ToM abilities early, but the ToM required in this model seems pretty sophisticated. So maybe kids have a limited ToM to begin with, and that plays out in this model in a different way than the model is currently set up. Then, we compare the ToM-limited model vs. the model given here against children’s behavior, and see which fits best at different stages of development.

Some additional comments:
(1) Looking at Figure 2B, it seems like humans (far right panel) still have a bit of the literal interpretation bias (more of a spike at exactly 1000 for “costs $1,000”) and a bit of the imprecise goal bias (more of a spike at 1001) than the full model does (next panel to the left). I wonder if this separates out by individuals — I could imagine some people being more literal than others (maybe due to natural variation, or because of an Asperger Syndrome type condition).


(2) Related to the above, the imprecise goal seems to be another communicative dimension, but it’s not talked about that way. Instead, we have “truth” vs. “affect”, and then imprecise goal gets folded into affect. I wonder why — perhaps because “imprecise goal” is a way to signal “this is not the truth”? If so, that would require fairly sophisticated communicative knowledge. On the other hand, Kao et al. (2014) treat it as completely separate in the Materials and Methods section — precision of goal (precise vs. imprecise) is fully crossed with communicative goal (truth vs. affect vs. both). So, it does start to feel like an additional communicative dimension.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Some thoughts on Kolodny et al. 2015

There are two main things that I really enjoyed about this paper: (1) the explicit attempt to incorporate known properties of language acquisition into the proposed model (unsupervised learning, incremental learning, generative capacity of the learner), and (2) the breadth of empirical studies they tried to validate the proposed model on. Having said this, each of these things has a slight downside for me, given the way that they were covered in this paper.  

First, there seems to be a common refrain of “biological realism”, with the idea that the proposed model does this far better than any other model to date. I found myself wondering how true this was — pretty much every acquisition model we examine in the reading group has included the core properties of unsupervised learning and generative capacity, and all the algorithmic-level ones include incremental learning of some kind. What seems to separate the proposed model from these is the potential domain-generality of its components. That is, it’s meant to apply to any sequential hierarchically structured system, as opposed just to language. But even for this, isn’t that exactly what Bayesian inference does too? It’s the units and hypothesis spaces that are language-specific, not the inference mechanism.

Second, because K&al covered empirical data from so many studies, I felt like I didn’t really understand any individual study that well or even the specifics of how the model works on a concrete example. This is probably a length consideration issue (breadth of coverage trumped depth of coverage), but I really do wish more space had been devoted to a concrete walk-through of how these graphs get built up incrementally (and how the different link types are decided and what it means for something to be “shifted in time”, etc.). I want to like this model, but I just don’t understand the nitty gritty of how it works.

So, given this, I wasn’t too surprised that the Pearl & Sprouse island effects didn’t work out. The issue to me is that K&al were running their model over units that weren’t abstract enough — the P&S strategy worked because it was using trigrams of phrase structure (not trigrams of POS categories, as K&al described it). And not just any phrase structure —specifically, the phrase structure that would be “activated” because the gap is contained inside that phrase structure. So basically, the units are even more abstract than just phrase structure. They’re a subset of phrase structure nodes.  And that’s what trigrams get made out of. Trying to capture these same effects by using local context over words (or even categories that include clumps of words or phrases) seems like we're using the wrong units. I think K&al’s idea is that the appropriate “functionally similar” abstract units would be built up over time with the slot capacity of the graph inference algorithm (and maybe that’s why they alluded to a data sparseness issue). And that might be true…but it certainly remains to be concretely demonstrated.

Some other specific thoughts:

(1) 2.1, “…a unit that re-appears within a short time is likely to be significant” — This seems related to the idea of burstiness.

(2) 2.2, “…tokens are either separated by whitespaces…or…a whitespace is inserted between every two adjacent tokens” — Is this a default for a buffer size of two units? And if so, why? Something about adjacency?

(3) 2.3, “…create a new supernode, A + B, if sanctioned by Barlow’s (1990) principle of suspicious coincidence, subject to a prior” — How exactly does this work? Is it like Bayesian inference? What determines the prior?

(4) 2.4, “…when a recurring sequence….is found within the short-term memory by alignment of the sequence to a shifted version of itself” — How exactly is the shifted version created? How big is the buffer? How cognitively intensive is this to do?

(5) 2.6, “…i.e., drawing with a higher probability nodes that contain longer sequences” — Why would this bias be built in explicitly? If anything, I would thing shorter sequences would have a higher probability.

(6) 3.1, Figure 2: It seems like the U-MILA suddenly does just great on and 9 and 10 word sequences, after doing poorly on 6-8 word sequences. Why should this be? 

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Some thoughts on Heinz 2015 book chapters, parts 6-9

Continuing on from last time, where we read up through the discussion about constraints on strings, Heinz’s 2015 book chapter now gets into the constraints on maps between the underlying form and the observable form of a phonological string. As before, I found the more leisurely walk-through of the different ideas (complete with illustrative figures) quite accessible. The only gap in that respect for me as a non-phonologist was what an opaque map was, since Heinz mentions that opaque maps raise potential issues for the computational approach here. A quick googling pulled up some examples, but a brief concrete example would have been helpful.

On a more a contentful note, I found the compare and contrast with the optimality approach quite interesting. We have this great setup for some logically possible maps that are derivationally simple (e.g. “Sour Grapes”), and yet we find these maps unattested. Optimality has to add stuff in to take care of it, while the computational ontology Heinz presents neatly separates them out. Boom. Simple. 

So then this leads me (as an acquisition person) to wondering what we can do with this learning-wise. Let’s say we have the set of phonological maps that occur in human language captured by a certain type of relationship (input-strictly local [ISL]) — there are some exceptions currently, but let’s say those get sorted out. Then, we also have some computational learnability results about how to learn these types of maps in the limit. Can I, as an acquisition modeler, then do something with those algorithms? Or do I need to develop other algorithms based off of those that do the same thing, only in plausible time limits? 

And let’s make this even more concrete, actually — suppose there are a set of maps capturing English phonology that we think children learn by a certain age. Suppose that we do the kind of analysis Heinz suggests and discover all these maps are ISL. What kind of learning algorithms should I model to see if children could learn the right maps from English child-directed data? Are the existing learnability algorithms the ones? Or do I need to adapt them somehow? Or is it more that they serve to show it’s possible, but they may bear no resemblance to the algorithms kids would actually have to use? Given Heinz’s comment at the end of part 5 about the link between algorithm and representation, I feel like the existing algorithms should be related to the ones kids approximate if that kind of link is there.

A few other thoughts: 

(1) Heinz points out the interesting dichotomy between tone maps and segment maps, where the tone maps allow more complex relationships. He mentions that this has been used to argue for modularity (where tones are in one module and segments are in the other, presumably), and that could very well be. What it also shows is that there isn’t just one restriction on the complexity in general — a more restrictive one occurs for segment maps but a less restrictive one occurs for tone maps. Why? Two thoughts: (1) Maybe the less restrictive one is the general abstract restriction, and something special happens for segments that further restricts it. This fits into the modularity explanation above. But (2) maybe it’s just chance that we haven’t found segment maps that violate the more restrictive restriction. If so, we wouldn’t need the modularity explanation since the difference between segment maps and tonal maps would just be, in effect, a sampling error (more samples if we had them would show segment maps that don’t follow that extra restriction). Caveat: I’m not sure how plausible this second idea is, given how many segment maps we have access to.

(2) I’m still not sure how much faith I have in the artificial language learning experiments that are meant to show that humans can’t learn certain types of generalizations/rules/mappings. I definitely believe that the subjects struggled to learn certain ones in the experiment while finding others easy to learn. But how much of that is effectively an L2 transfer effect? That is, the easy-to-learn ones are the ones in your native language, so (abstractly) you already have a bunch of experience with those and no experience with the other hard-to-learn kind. To be fair, I’m not sure how you could factor out the L2 transfer effect — no matter what you do with adults (or even kids), if it’s a language thing, they’ve already had exposure from their native language.


(3) Something for NLP applications (maybe): Section 6.4, “The simplest maps are Markovian on the input or the output (ISL, LOSL, and ROSL), and very many phonological transformations belong to these classes.” — This makes me think that the simpler representations NLP apps tend to use for speech recognition and production (ex: various forms of Hidden Markov Models, I think) may not be so far off from the truth, if this approach is correct.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Some thoughts on Heinz 2015 book chapter, parts 1-5

For me, this was a very accessible introduction to a lot of the formal terminology and distinctions that computational learnability research trades in. (For instance, I think this may be the first time I really understood why we would be excited that generalizations would be strictly local or strictly piecewise.) From an acquisition point of view, I was very into some particular ideas/approaches:

(1) the distinction between an intensional description (i.e., theoretical constructs that compactly capture the data) and an extension (i.e., the actual pattern of data), along with the analogy to the finite means (intensional description) that accounts for the infinite use (extension). If there’s a reasonable way to talk about the extension, we get a true atheoretical description of the empirical data, which seems like an excellent jumping off point for describing the target state of acquisition.

(2) the approach of defining the implicit hypothesis space, i.e., the fundamental pieces that explicit hypothesis spaces (or generalizations) are built from. This feels very similar to the old school Principles & Parameters approach to language acquisition (specifically, the Principles part, if we’re talking about the things that don’t vary). It also jives well with some recent thoughts in the Bayesian inference sphere (e.g., see Perfors 2012 for implicit vs. explicit hypothesis spaces).

**Perfors, A. 2012. Bayesian Models of Cognition: What's Built in After All? Philosophy Compass, 7(2), 127-138.

(3) that tie-in between the nature of phonological generalizations, the algorithms that can learn those generalizations, and why this might support those generalizations as actual human mental representations. In particular, “Constraints on phonological well-formedness are SL and SP because people learn phonology in the way suggested by these algorithms.” (End of section 5.2.1)

When I first read this, it seemed odd to me — we’re saying something like: “Look! Human language makes only these kinds of generalizations, because there are constraints! And hey, these are the algorithms that can learn those constrained generalizations! Therefore, the reason these constraints exist is because these algorithms are the ones people use!” It felt as if a step were missing at first glance: we use the constrained generalizations as a basis for positing certain learning algorithms, and then we turn that on its head immediately and say that those algorithms *are* the ones humans use and that’s the basis for the constrained generalizations we see. 

But when I looked at it again (and again), I realized that this did actually make sense to me. The way we got to story may have been a little roundabout, but the basic story of “these constraints on representations exist because human brains learn things in a specific way” is very sensible (and picked up again in 5.4: “…human learners generalize in particular ways—and the ways they generalize yield exactly these classes”). And what this does is provide a concrete example of exactly what constraints and exactly what specific learning procedures we’re talking about for phonology.

(4) There’s a nice little typology connection at the end of section 5.1, based on these formal complexity ontologies: “…the widely-attested constraints are the formally simple ones, where the measure of complexity is determined according to these hierarchies”. Thinking back to links with acquisition, would this be because the human brain is sensitive to the complexity levels (however that might be instantiated)? If so, the prevalence of less complex constraints is due to how easy they are to learn with a human brain. (Or any brain?)



Friday, April 3, 2015

Next time on 4/17/15 @ 12pm in SBSG 2221 = Heinz 2015 book chapter, parts 1-5

It looks like a good collective time to meet will be Fridays at 12pm for this quarter, so that's what we'll plan on.  Our first meeting will be on April 17, and our complete schedule is available on the webpage at 


On April 17, we'll be discussing the first part of a book chapter (parts 1-5) on computational phonology that focuses on the kinds of generalizations and computations that seem to occur in this linguistic domain. This can be very useful for us to think about as modelers if we want to understand the hypothesis spaces learners have for making phonological generalizations.

Heinz, J. 2015 Manuscript. The computational nature of phonological generalizations. University of Delaware. Please do not cite without permission from Jeff Heinz.


See you on April 17!

Friday, March 27, 2015

Spring quarter scheduling

I hope everyone's had a good spring break - and now it's time to gear up for the spring quarter of the reading group! :) The schedule of readings is now posted on the CoLa Reading group webpage, including readings on phonology, process models, and pragmatics:

http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/colareadinggroup/schedule.html

Now all we need to do is converge on a specific day and time - please let me know by next Thursday (4/2/15) what your availability is during the week. We'll continue our tradition of meeting for approximately one hour (and of course, posting on the discussion board here).

Thanks and see you soon!
-Lisa

Friday, March 13, 2015

See you in the spring!

Thanks so much to everyone who was able to join us for our enlightening discussion today about Viau et al. 2010, and to everyone who's joined us throughout the winter quarter! The CoLa Reading Group will resume again in the spring quarter. As always, feel free to send me suggestions of articles you're interested in reading, especially if you happen across something particularly interesting!

-Lisa

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Some thoughts on Viau et al. 2010

I really enjoyed the clear delineation of structural vs. semantic vs. pragmatic factors described — it makes it easier to imagine a formal model of interpreting these kind of utterances. For example, things that matter: 

(i) how recently a logic structural computation has begin computed (structure)
(ii) what meaning/extension has recently been accessed, irrespective of the structure that generated it (semantics)
(iii) what the likely communicative intention is, given the discourse (pragmatics)

In particular, it’s the dependencies between these three that seem particularly interesting, since this paper provides concrete evidence of how much impact (i) and (ii) can have when (iii) is minimized, and also how (ii) can impact (i).

Also, I kept thinking about how the phenomena described might relate to a Rational Speech Act (RSA) model of language use, which typically gets at the pragmatics (iii) by saying something about the meanings that were intended (ii). So maybe what we’d really want in order to capture what’s going on during interpretation is to use something RSA-like to model the pragmatics, while also having a processing model that deals with how accessible the structures (i) and extensions (ii) are to a child learner (or even an adult, I suppose).

More specific thoughts:

(1) I was surprised to read that non-isomorphic scope readings only seem to be a problem when negation is involved, based on Goro 2007 (intro, a paragraph before example 5). So kids are fine for something like “Everyone saw a movie”, where a >> every  = There’s a specific movie that every person saw. But as soon as we stick in negation (“Everyone didn’t see a movie”), the non-isomorphic reading with “not” at the top becomes hard for kids to get (i.e., not >> every, a = It’s not true that every person saw a movie — some did, some didn’t). This makes “not” special. And I wonder if the RSA-style models have anything to say about that, since it does seem very pragmatics-based. (Though I suppose “not” is also special syntactically since it doesn’t have to be a determiner, and it’s also special semantically since it inverts the meaning.)

In footnote 6, in section 3.1.5.,  V&al2010 mention a little about what’s going on with respect to the pragmatics, as they discuss a hypothesis that negating positive expectations (“They all were going to…but look! Some didn’t.”) is easier than negating negative expectations (“They all weren’t going to — but look! Some did!”). Let’s suppose this is true — is this easy to instantiate in an RSA-like model? Does it maybe fall out from assumptions that are natural in an RSA-like model?

(2) That crazy effect in experiment two, where they give kids expected success (ES) stories and get a super-duper non-isomorphic access effect when they take away that supportive pragmatic environment (i.e., give them expected failure (EF) setups): We can see this pretty starkly in Figure 5. I don’t think V&al2010 quite know what’s going on with that either. I guess it could be structural and semantic priming just taking over, and since the kids don’t get any evidence that this is wrong, we maybe get a training effect. But this would be a pretty cool behavior to capture in a model that didn’t explicitly build it in.


(3) Footnote 16 right at the end about how long the priming lasted — 3 days to a month sounds like a very long time. My (fairly uninformed and probably out-of-date) recollection about syntactic priming suggested that structure priming effects are usually pretty short-lived. So something lasting this long is a major implicit learning kind of thing. Maybe this happened because the logical structure is connected to specific extensions that mattered in the context of the experiments? So the idea would be that this connection between multiple representations (one of which is more conscious and matters for communication, i.e., the semantic extension) is what caused the evidence accrued during the experiment to have more of an impact on these kids.

Friday, February 27, 2015

Next time on 3/13/15 @ 11:30am in SBSG 2221 = Viau et al. 2010

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our enlightening discussion of Frank et al. 2013!  For our next CoLa reading group meeting on Friday March 13 at 11:30am in SBSG 2221, we'll be looking at an article discusses some experimental results relating to quantifiers and scope. These kind of results can help us think about the learning process underlying them, and how we might be able to use modeling to discover things about that learning process.

Viau, J., Lidz, J., & Musolino, J. 2010. Priming of abstract logical representations in 4-year-oldsLanguage Acquisition, 17(1-2), 26-50.

See you then!
-Lisa

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Some thoughts on Frank et al. 2013

One of the things I really liked about this paper was the intention to integrate more context into a computational model of acquisition (in this case, implemented as the child using utterance type information). While the particular utterance types may be idealized, it’s an excellent first step to show where this information helps and how the number of utterance types impacts that helpfulness (basically, as a proxy for more preceding context when there’s data sparseness). More generally, this got me thinking about approximation, e.g., approximating more context by the utterance type cue and approximating hierarchical structure with trigrams. We know it’s not the same, but it seems to be good enough, perhaps because it manages to capture the relevant property anyway. (For the utterance type approximating more context, this seems to be true — utterance type tells you about category order stuff more generally, and preceding context gives you specific category order information for the local environment.)

The authors also note that the actual utterance types children infer may be based on a number of cues, such as prosody (in particular, pitch contour or intonation). Knowing the ideal number of utterance types might be useful so we know how many classes we’re aiming for, based on these cues. At the very least, the results here suggest fewer may be better. Relatedly: recent experimental work by Geffen & Mintz (2014) suggests 12-month-olds can at least make a binary classification between declaratives vs. yes/no questions in English in the absence of prosodic contour cues — so there may be other cues infants are able to use besides prosody at the age when early grammatical categorization would be happening.
*Reference: Geffen, S. & Mintz, T. 2014. Can You Believe It? 12-Month-Olds Use Word Order to Distinguish Between Declaratives and Polar Interrogatives. Language Learning and Development. DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2014.951595.

More specific thoughts:

(1) Introduction, age ranges: “…children who are at the point of learning syntax — at 2-3 years of age” — This is just me being persnickety, but I think the age is closer to 1 if we’re talking about early categorization before the learner has any knowledge of categories (which is the start state of the learner modeled here).  I don’t think it matters for the model they do here and the cues they rely on, but it’s a more general point about these kinds of computational models. If we’re going to a model a process where the learner is basically starting from scratch (no prior knowledge of categories here), then this is going to be happening very early and probably won’t persist for very long. Even after a little of this kind of learning, the learner then has some knowledge, which ought to bias future learning (future categorization here). This brings up the tricky subject of what the output ought to be for such early stage learning models (which Lawrence, Galia, and I have been worrying about lately). Do we really want adult-level grammatical categories? Maybe not. But what’s acceptable output and how do we tell if we’ve got it? F&al2013 sensibly compare the inferred categories to the CHILDES-annotated categories, which are based on adult categories. But if this is meant to model early categorization occurring around 12 months and only lasting long enough to boost other categorization, maybe that’s not the output we want. 

(2) English experiments, 4.1.1. Corpora, methods quibble: “Wh-words are tagged as adverbs…pronouns…or determiners.”  — I wonder why. Wh-words have pretty distinct properties with respect to word order (wh-fronting in English), among other things. It seems like it might have been more useful to cluster wh-words together into their own category.

(3) English experiments, 4.1.2. Inference: Somewhat related to the point above, it’d be a nice extension to not preset the number of categories the learner is meant to identify, and instead infer how many categories are best and what words belong in those categories. (Hello, infinite BHMM…)

(4) 5.2, BHMM-E: This is a really nice demonstration of how wrong assumptions hurt. It seem like we often see models that show how assumptions are helpful (because, hey, that’s interesting!), but it’s less often that we see such a clean demonstration of active harm resulting (instead of it just having no effect).


(5) 5.4.3, cross-linguistic variation: “Spanish does not show the same improvement…BHMM-T models do not differ from the baseline BHMM” — It sounds like whether infants heed utterance type as a cue may need to be learned, rather than just being a thing they do. Though since it doesn’t actually harm (it just doesn’t help), maybe it’s okay for infants to try to use it anyway in Spanish. However, just brainstorming about how infants might learn to pay attention to word type…perhaps they could notice word order differences across utterance types (i.e., use various cues to identify utterance types and then see if word order as defined by specific recognizable words — rather than grammatical categories — seems to change). Then, if word order varies, use utterance type information for categorization; if not, then don’t. 

Friday, February 13, 2015

Next time on 2/27/15 @ 11:30am in SBSG 2221 = Frank et al. 2013

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our vigorous and educational discussion of Yurovsky & Frank’s 2014 Ms!  For our next CoLa reading group meeting on Friday February 27 at 11:30am in SBSG 2221, we'll be looking at an article that shows how a Bayesian model of early grammatical categorization can incorporate (and benefit from) information relating to utterance type.

Frank, S., Goldwater, S., & Keller, F. 2013. Adding sentence types to a model of syntactic category acquisitionTopics in Cognitive Science, 5(3), 495-521.

See you then!

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Some thoughts on Yurovsky & Frank 2014 Ms

One thing I really enjoyed about this paper was the integration of cognitive resource constraints (memory and attention) into an ideal learner model. I may have some quibbles as to calling this “algorithmic” vs. “computational” (more on this below), since that distinction for me has to do with the inference process, but the core idea of including these aspects in the learning model seems like a nice step forward.

That being said, I thought the way “attention” was integrated was a bit curious — if I’m understanding correctly, it was part of the speaker’s intentions (I). Is this because the listener focuses her attention on the speaker’s intention to refer to something repeatedly? That’s the best link I could come up with. (More discussion on this below, too.) If so, I could imagine this ability maturing over time, so that early word-learners (~1 year old) have less ability to do this accurately than adults.

Back to more general things: This was also a nice demonstration of how two very different stories of a process can be implementations of a more general approach (as represented by the $sigma variable). Still, as the authors themselves note, it’s unclear what this particular study shows for either L1 or L2 learning. But it’s a good methodology demonstration, and maybe once more L1 data is available, this model can be applied to tell us something about word learning in toddlers.

More specific comments: 

(1) Introduction, “…both of these algorithmic-level solutions will, in the limit, produce successful word-reference mapping, they will do so at very different rates…may be necessary to posit additional biases and constraints on learners in order for human-scale lexicons to be learned in human-scale time from the input available to children” — This is a very good point, and highlights one important measure of algorithmic-level approaches. That being said, I think the particular approaches being discussed here are really only meant to apply to very early word-learning when almost no words are already known, which may only last a short while. So, the “human-scale lexicon” may be rather small.

(2) Model, p.17: “…the most convenient place to integrate attention is in defining the learner’s beliefs about P(I | O)…[o]ne possibility is to let each object be equally likely to be the intended reference…[a]lternatively, the learner could place all the probability mass on one hypothesized referent…more flexible alternative is to assign some probability mass $sigma to the hypothesized referent…” — So this is the specific instantiation I alluded to in my comment at the beginning. Since I is meant to be about the speaker’s intentions, it seems like this has to be some kind of theory of mind thing, where the listener assumes the speaker is intending to talk about everything with uniform probability (option one), only one thing all the time (option two), or some things more than other (option three). This seems vaguely odd as a model of listener “attention”, though it may capture assumptions about communicative goals very naturally.


(3) General Discussion, p.21: “…graded shift in representation was well-described by an ideal learning model, but only when this model was modified to take into account psychological constraints on attention and memory…the shift from a computational to an algorithmic (or, psychological) description was critical” — And this is where my quibbles arise. I completely agree that integrating resource constraints is a great step forward, but I hesitate to say these were integrated at the algorithmic level. The inference process was still MCMC, if I understood correctly, and I don’t think any modification was done to it. So, for me, that’s a way to approximate the optimal inference, and so is a computational-level thing. Maybe this is more “rational process model”, though (one step down from pure computational, but not yet what I'd call algorithmic)? 

Friday, January 23, 2015

Next time on 2/13/15 @ 11:30am in SBSG 2221 = Yurovsky & Frank 2014 Ms

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for our educational discussion of Johnson 2013!  For our next CoLa reading group meeting on Friday February 13 at 11:30am in SBSG 2221, we'll be looking at a manuscript that explores a model of word learning, integrating non-linguistic aspects such as memory and attention.

Yurovsky, D. & Frank, M. 2014. An Integrative Account of Constraints on Cross-Situational Learning. Manuscript, Stanford University.


See you then!

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Some thoughts on Johnson 2013

Something I really liked about this paper was Johnson’s sensitivity to the problems that occur during actual acquisition even as he gave an intuitive overview about different approximation algorithms used in machine learning. He also made a point to connect with linguistic theory related to acquisition (e.g., Universal Grammar, uniqueness constraint, etc.) This makes it much easier for acquisition people who aren’t necessarily modelers to understand why they should care about these approaches, especially when the particular structures Johnson uses for his demonstrations (PCFGs) are known to be not quite right (which Johnson himself helpfully points out right at the beginning).

Some more targeted thoughts:

(1) Johnson makes a point at the very beginning about the utility of joint inference of syntactic structure and grammatical categories (which he calls lexical categories), and how better performance is obtained that way (as opposed to solving one problem after another). This seems to be another example of this joint-inference-is-better thing, which is getting a fair amount of play in the acquisition modeling literature. Bigger point: Information from one problem can help usefully constrain another. Smaller quibble: I think grammatical categories may be learned earlier than syntactic structure, so we may want something like an informed prior when it comes to the grammatical categories if we still want syntactic structure and grammatical categorization to be solved simultaneously.

(2) This comment in section 3: “…suggesting the attractive possibility that at least some aspects of language acquisition may be an almost cost-free by-product of parsing. That is, the child’s efforts at language comprehension may supply the information they need for language acquisition.” This reminds me very strongly of Fodor’s (1998) “Parsing to Learn” approach, which talks about exactly this idea. (A number of follow up papers with William Sakas also tackle this issue.) Fodor’s learner was using parsing to help figure out Universal Grammar parameter settings, but the idea is exactly the same — because parsing is already happening, the learner can leverage the information from that process to learn about the structure of her language.

**Fodor, J. D. 1998. Parsing to learn. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(3), 339-374.

(3) Related to the smaller quibble above in (1): Johnson notes later on in section 3 that “it’s hard to see how any ‘staged’ learner (which attempted to learn lexical entries before learning syntax, or vice versa) could succeed on this data”. The important unspoken part is “using just this strategy”, I’m assuming — because certainly it’s possible to learn grammatical categories using other strategies just fine. In fact, most of the grammatical categorization models I’m aware of do just this (though some do incorporate aspects of syntactic structure in the grammatical category inference).

(4) This point in section 5 seems spot on to me: “…language learning may require additional information beyond that contained in a set of strings of surface forms.” Johnson jumps straight to non-linguistic information, but I’m imagining that semantics would still be counted as linguistic, and that seems super-important for a number of syntactic structure things (e.g., animacy for learning about the appropriate meanings for tough-constructions: The apple was easy to eat. vs. The girl was eager to eat (the apple).

(5) The production model by Johnson & Riezler (2002) discussed later on in that section was interesting, where the input is the intended logical form (hierarchical semantic structure…which presumably maps to syntactic structure?) and the output is the observed string. Presumably this is how you could design a generative learning model, where the goal is to infer the syntactic structure that corresponds to the observed string, with the idea that the syntactic structure was used to generate the string.

(6) This in the conclusion: “…in principle it should be possible for Bayesian priors to express the kinds of rich linguistic knowledge that linguists posit for Universal Grammar. It would be extremely interesting to investigate just what a statistical estimator using linguistically plausible parameters might be able to learn.  — Exactly this! I’ve long (vaguely) pondered how to connect the sorts of parameters in, say, a parametric representation of metrical phonology to the kinds of precise mathematical priors Bayesian models use. Somehow, somehow it seems possible…and then perhaps the two uses of “parameter” could be reconciled more precisely.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Next time on 1/23/15 @ 11:30am in SBSG 2221 = Johnson 2013

Hi everyone,

It looks like a good collective time to meet will be Fridays at 11:30am for this quarter, so that's what we'll plan on.  Our first meeting will be on January 23, and our complete schedule is available on the webpage at 


On January 23, we'll be discussing a book chapter that looks closely at the idea that language acquisition is a statistical inference problem, and examines how to translate current machine learning statistical inference approaches to implementations that would work for acquisition.

Johnson, M. 2013. Language acquisition as statistical inference. In Stephen R. Anderson, Jacques Moeschler,  and Fabienne Reboul, (eds.), The Language-Cognition Interface, Libraire Droz, Geneva, 109-134.

http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/colareadinggroup/readings/Johnson2013_LangAcqStatInf.pdf

See you on January 23!