Papers by Zahra Shekarchi
Children learn word meanings by making use of commonalities across the usages of a word in differ... more Children learn word meanings by making use of commonalities across the usages of a word in different situations. However, early word learning experiences have a high level of uncertainty. For a word in an utterance, there are many possible meanings in the environment (referential uncertainty). Similarly, for a meaning, there are multiple possible words in the utterance (linguistic uncertainty). We propose a general framework to investigate the role of mutual exclusivity bias (asserting one-to-one mappings between words and their meanings) in early word learning. Through a set of computational studies, we show that to successfully learn word meanings under uncertainty, a model needs to implement two types of competition: words competing for the association to a meaning reduces linguistic uncertainty, and meanings competing for a word limits referential uncertainty. Our work highlights the importance of an algorithmic-level analysis to shed light on different mechanisms that implement...
ArXiv, 2020
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in whi... more Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. In a set of computational studies, we show that to successfully learn word meanings in the face of uncertainty, a learner needs to use two types of competition: words competing for association to a referent when learning from an observation and referents competing for a word when the word is used.
ArXiv, 2020
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every t... more Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a change can be more desirable for humans, or cognitively easier to be used by humans. Finding the patterns of these changes is interesting and can reveal some facts about human cognitive evolution. As we have enough resources for studying this problem, it is a good idea to work on the problem through computational modeling, and that can make the work easier and possible to be studied on large scale. In this work, we want to study the nouns which have been used as verbs after some years of their emergence as nouns and find some commonalities among these nouns. In other words, we are interested in finding what potential requirements are essential for this change.
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Papers by Zahra Shekarchi