Early Syntactic Bootstrapping in an Incremental Memory-Limited Word Learner

This work explores the possibility of learning word order before syntactic concepts such as subject, object, or lexical A hallmark of human word learning is the integration categories or syntactic parse representations are available of cross-situational information even though this information to the learner. It also examines the utility of the acquired is not always reliable as inconsistencies in the wordreferent word order in a joint learner where word order knowledge co-occurrence (e.g., when the referent is absent in a constrains word learning (syntactic bootstrapping) and vice scene or when distracting referents are present) inject noise versa. We propose that the transitional probabilities of the into cross-situational information. It has been suggested thematic roles (in the order of their appearance in the utterance) that bootstrapping cross-situational word learning with the of the referential words (words with action or event learner's belief about the referential intentions of the speaker participant referents) are an invaluable source of information (Frank, Goodman, and Tenenbaum 2009) as well as bootstrapping for learning word order and that they can provide an it with learner's belief about the syntactic regularities initial understanding of the notion of word order in early of language (Yu 2006; Maurits, Perfors, and Navarro stages of language acquisition in the absence of advanced 2009; Alishahi and Fazly 2010; Alishahi and Chrupała 2012; syntactic concepts or representations. We utilize an incremental Abend et al. 2017) allow for disambiguation and should and memory-limited learning algorithm as opposed thus improve word learning. Maurits, Perfors, and Navarro to batch learning algorithms, as we are interested in online (2009) bootstrap word learning with the acquired knowledge learning in embodied agents with computational limitations. of word order in an ideal learner although their model cannot Our model adds the notion of syntax to the word learning