Talk on the emergence of language universals by Tessa Verhoef - 9 December @12, PCH 6.05

[Raquel G. Alhama]

Dear all,

We are delighted to announce that Tessa Verhoef (Leiden University) will give the next talk in our Language Evolution and Learning Amsterdam series (see title and abstract below). 

Come and see the talk in person in PCH room 6.05, or join online on Zoom (meeting ID 878 2270 6729)  on Monday 9 December, 12:00-13:00 CET.

We hope to see you all there!

Kind regards,

Katrin Schulz, Raquel G. Alhama, Fausto Carcassi, Marieke Schouwstra

Info: https://sites.google.com/view/lela-amsterdam

Email list (sign up): https://groups.google.com/g/lelams/  

p.s. Our email list is still modest in size; if you think of anyone who might be interested in this talk, please forward this message!

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speaker: Tessa Verhoef (Leiden University)

title: The emergence of language universals in neural agents and vision-and-language models

location: PCH 6.05. We will offer this as a hybrid event; meeting Meeting ID: 878 2270 6729

abstract: 

Human cognition constrains how we communicate. Our cognitive biases and preferences interact with the processes that drive language emergence and change in non-trivial ways. A powerful method to discern the roles of cognitive biases and processes like language learning and use in shaping linguistic structure is to build agent-based models. Recent advances in computational linguistics and deep learning sparked a renewed interest in such simulations, creating the opportunity to model increasingly realistic phenomena. These models simulate emergent communication, referring to the spontaneous development of a communication system through repeated interactions between individual neural network agents. However, a crucial challenge in this line of work is that such artificial learners still often behave differently from human learners. Directly inspired by human artificial language learning studies, we proposed a novel framework for simulating language learning and change, which allows agents to first learn an artificial language and then use it to communicate, with the aim of studying the emergence of specific linguistics properties. I will present two studies using this framework to simulate the emergence of a well-known language phenomenon: the word-order/case-marking trade-off. I will also share some very recent findings where we test for the presence of a well-known human cross-modal mapping preference (the bouba-kiki effect) in vision-and-language models. Cross-modal associations play an essential role in human language understanding, learning, and evolution, but our findings reveal that current multimodal language models do not align well with such human preferences.