Competition in Cross-situational Word Learning: A Computational Study

Abstract: 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. We propose a modeling framework to investigate the role of mutual exclusivity bias - asserting one-to-one mappings between words and their meanings - in reducing uncertainty in word learning. 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. Our work highlights the importance of an algorithmic-level analysis to shed light on the utility of different mechanisms that can implement the same computational-level theory.