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**Conclusions: | **Conclusions: | ||
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+ | The infant language learning literature has often been | ||
+ | framed around the question ‘‘rules or statistics? | ||
+ | that this is the wrong question. Even if infants represent | ||
+ | symbolic rules with relations like identity—and there | ||
+ | is every reason to believe they do—there is still the question | ||
+ | of how they learn these rules, and how they converge | ||
+ | on the correct rule so quickly in a large hypothesis space. | ||
+ | This challenge requires statistics for guiding generalization | ||
+ | from sparse data. | ||
+ | \\ | ||
+ | from sparse data. | ||
+ | In our work here we have shown how domain-general | ||
+ | statistical inference principles operating over minimal | ||
+ | rule-like representations can explain a broad set of results | ||
+ | in the rule learning literature. | ||
+ | \\ | ||
+ | The inferential principles encoded in our models—the | ||
+ | size principle (or in its more general form, Bayesian Occam’s | ||
+ | razor) and the non-parametric tradeoff between | ||
+ | complexity and fit to data encoded in the Chinese Restaurant | ||
+ | Process—are not only useful in modeling rule learning | ||
+ | within simple artificial languages. They are also the same | ||
+ | principles that are used in computational systems for natural | ||
+ | language processing that are engineered to scale to | ||
+ | large datasets. These principle have been applied to tasks | ||
+ | as varied as unsupervised word segmentation (Brent, | ||
+ | 1999; Goldwater, Griffiths, & Johnson, 2009), morphology | ||
+ | learning (Albright & Hayes, 2003; Goldwater et al., 2006; | ||
+ | Goldsmith, 2001), and grammar induction (Bannard, | ||
+ | Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009; Klein & Manning, 2005; Perfors, | ||
+ | Tenenbaum, & Regier, 2006). | ||
+ | \\ | ||
+ | First, our models assumed the minimal machinery | ||
+ | needed to capture a range of findings. Rather than making | ||
+ | a realistic guess about the structure of the hypothesis | ||
+ | space for rule learning, where evidence was limited we assumed | ||
+ | the simplest possible structure. For example, | ||
+ | although there is some evidence that infants may not always | ||
+ | encode absolute positions (Lewkowicz & Berent, | ||
+ | 2009), there have been few rule learning studies that go | ||
+ | beyond three-element strings. We therefore defined our | ||
+ | rules based on absolute positions in fixed-length strings. | ||
+ | For the same reason, although previous work on adult concept | ||
+ | learning has used infinitely expressive hypothesis | ||
+ | spaces with prior distributions that penalize complexity | ||
+ | (e.g. Goodman, Tenenbaum, Feldman, & Griffiths, 2008; | ||
+ | Kemp, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2008), we chose a simple | ||
+ | uniform prior over rules instead. With the collection of | ||
+ | more data from infants, however, we expect that both | ||
+ | more complex hypothesis spaces and priors that prefer | ||
+ | simpler hypotheses will become necessary. | ||
+ | \\ | ||
+ | Second, our models operated over unique string types | ||
+ | as input rather than individual tokens. This assumption | ||
+ | highlights an issue in interpreting the a parameter of Models | ||
+ | 2 and 3: there are likely different processes of forgetting | ||
+ | that happen over types and tokens. While individual tokens | ||
+ | are likely to be forgotten or misperceived with constant | ||
+ | probability, | ||
+ | misremembered or corrupted will grow smaller as more | ||
+ | tokens of that type are observed (Frank et al., 2010). An | ||
+ | interacting issue concerns serial position effects. Depending | ||
+ | on the location of identity regularities within sequences, | ||
+ | rules vary in the ease with which they can be | ||
+ | learned (Endress, Scholl, & Mehler, 2005; Johnson et al., | ||
+ | 2009). Both of these sets of effects could likely be captured | ||
+ | by a better understanding of how limits on memory interact | ||
+ | with the principles underlying rule learning. Although a | ||
+ | model that operates only over types may be appropriate | ||
+ | for experiments in which each type is nearly always heard | ||
+ | the same number of times, models that deal with linguistic | ||
+ | data must include processes that operate over both types | ||
+ | and tokens (Goldwater et al., 2006; Johnson, Griffiths, & | ||
+ | Goldwater, 2007). | ||
+ | \\ | ||
+ | Finally, though the domain-general principles we have | ||
+ | identified here do capture many results, there is some | ||
+ | additional evidence for domain-specific effects. Learners | ||
+ | may acquire expectations for the kinds of regularities that | ||
+ | appear in domains like music compared with those that | ||
+ | appear in speech (Dawson & Gerken, 2009); in addition, a | ||
+ | number of papers have described a striking dissociation | ||
+ | between the kinds of regularities that can be learned from | ||
+ | vowels and those that can be learned from consonants | ||
+ | (Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehler, 2005; Toro, Nespor, | ||
+ | Mehler, & Bonatti, 2008). Both sets of results point to a | ||
+ | need for a hierarchical approach to rule learning, in which | ||
+ | knowledge of what kinds of regularities are possible in a | ||
+ | domain can itself be learned from the evidence. Only | ||
+ | through further empirical and computational work can | ||
+ | we understand which of these effects can be explained | ||
+ | through acquired domain expectations and which are best | ||
+ | explained as innate domain-specific biases or constraints. | ||
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