Paper detail

Learning word-referent mappings and concepts from raw inputs

How do children learn correspondences between the language and the world from noisy, ambiguous, naturalistic input? One hypothesis is via cross-situational learning: tracking words and their possible referents across multiple situations allows learners to disambiguate correct word-referent mappings (Yu & Smith, 2007). However, previous models of cross-situational word learning operate on highly simplified representations, side-stepping two important aspects of the actual learning problem. First, how can word-referent mappings be learned from raw inputs such as images? Second, how can these learned mappings generalize to novel instances of a known word? In this paper, we present a neural network model trained from scratch via self-supervision that takes in raw images and words as inputs, and show that it can learn word-referent mappings from fully ambiguous scenes and utterances through cross-situational learning. In addition, the model generalizes to novel word instances, locates referents of words in a scene, and shows a preference for mutual exclusivity.