There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact generative model underlying a wide class of languages, purely from observing samples of the language. We then describe a recently proposed practical framework, which quantifies natural language learnability, allowing specific learnability predictions to be made for the first time. In previous work, this framework was used to make learnability predictions for a wide variety of linguistic constructions, for which learnability has been much debated. Here, we present a new experiment which tests these learnability predictions. We find that our experimental results support the possibility that these linguistic constructions are acquired probabilistically from cognition-general principles.
与目前最先进的语言模型不同，幼儿通过与周围环境和照顾者的互动来主动习得语言。一种被认为对语言学习至关重要的机制是推断社会环境中其他主体的心理状态的能力，由Premack和Woodruff（1978）创造的心理理论（ToM）。从Rabinowitz et al.（2018）和Zhu et al.（2021）实现的ToM的现代操作化版本中汲取灵感，我们构建了配备ToM的语言学习代理，并测量其对学习过程的影响。我们给说话者代理一个内部的听者模型，该模型与说话者一起训练，并用于对潜在的话语进行重新排序。我们用不同的任务难度进行实验，假设模型将获得更复杂的语言来适应更强的环境压力。我们发现，训练扬声器与一个高度加权的ToM听众组件导致性能增益在我们的图像参考游戏设置。我们还发现一些证据表明，在训练过程中增加任务难度会导致更流畅和准确的话语评价。这表明进一步将心理理论以及儿童语言习得的其他见解纳入语言习得的计算模型的潜在效用。
A Knowledge-Based Language Model: Deducing Grammatical Knowledge in a Multi-Agent Language Acquisition Simulation
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden University, the Netherlands（莱顿大学语言学中心（LUCL）、莱顿大学、荷兰）；Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, the Netherlands（莱顿脑与认知研究所（LIBC）、莱顿大学、荷兰）；City University of Hong Kong (CityU), Hong Kong（香港城市大学（CityU）、香港）
Unsupervised Acquisition of Discrete Grammatical Categories
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL)（莱顿大学语言研究中心）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）；Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC)（莱顿脑与认知研究所）；City University of Hong Kong (CityU)（香港城市大学）
