Terry Regier

Wanchun Li, Alexandra Carstensen, Yang Xu et al.

Variation in spatial categorization across languages is often studied by eliciting human labels for the relations depicted in a set of scenes known as the Topological Relations Picture Series (TRPS). We demonstrate that labels generated by large language models (LLMs) align relatively well with human labels, and show how LLM-generated labels can help to decide which scenes and languages to add to existing spatial data sets. To illustrate our approach we extend the TRPS by adding 42 new scenes, and show that this extension achieves better coverage of the space of possible scenes than two previous extensions of the TRPS. Our results provide a foundation for scaling towards spatial data sets with dozens of languages and hundreds of scenes.

Kayo Yin, Terry Regier, Dan Klein

Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality. We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.

Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Terry Regier

It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. We also show that some other proposals such as iterated learning alone, communication alone, or the greater learnability of convex categories, do not yield the same outcome as clearly. We conclude that the combination of iterated learning and communication provides a plausible means by which human semantic systems become efficient.

Geoff Bacon, Terry Regier

Learning representations that accurately model semantics is an important goal of natural language processing research. Many semantic phenomena depend on syntactic structure. Recent work examines the extent to which state-of-the-art models for pre-training representations, such as BERT, capture such structure-dependent phenomena, but is largely restricted to one phenomenon in English: number agreement between subjects and verbs. We evaluate BERT's sensitivity to four types of structure-dependent agreement relations in a new semi-automatically curated dataset across 26 languages. We show that both the single-language and multilingual BERT models capture syntax-sensitive agreement patterns well in general, but we also highlight the specific linguistic contexts in which their performance degrades.

Noga Zaslavsky, Terry Regier, Naftali Tishby et al.

It has been argued that semantic categories across languages reflect pressure for efficient communication. Recently, this idea has been cast in terms of a general information-theoretic principle of efficiency, the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and it has been shown that this principle accounts for the emergence and evolution of named color categories across languages, including soft structure and patterns of inconsistent naming. However, it is not yet clear to what extent this account generalizes to semantic domains other than color. Here we show that it generalizes to two qualitatively different semantic domains: names for containers, and for animals. First, we show that container naming in Dutch and French is near-optimal in the IB sense, and that IB broadly accounts for soft categories and inconsistent naming patterns in both languages. Second, we show that a hierarchy of animal categories derived from IB captures cross-linguistic tendencies in the growth of animal taxonomies. Taken together, these findings suggest that fundamental information-theoretic principles of efficient coding may shape semantic categories across languages and across domains.

Noga Zaslavsky, Charles Kemp, Terry Regier et al.

Maintaining efficient semantic representations of the environment is a major challenge both for humans and for machines. While human languages represent useful solutions to this problem, it is not yet clear what computational principle could give rise to similar solutions in machines. In this work we propose an answer to this open question. We suggest that languages compress percepts into words by optimizing the Information Bottleneck (IB) tradeoff between the complexity and accuracy of their lexicons. We present empirical evidence that this principle may give rise to human-like semantic representations, by exploring how human languages categorize colors. We show that color naming systems across languages are near-optimal in the IB sense, and that these natural systems are similar to artificial IB color naming systems with a single tradeoff parameter controlling the cross-language variability. In addition, the IB systems evolve through a sequence of structural phase transitions, demonstrating a possible adaptation process. This work thus identifies a computational principle that characterizes human semantic systems, and that could usefully inform semantic representations in machines.

Noga Zaslavsky, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby et al.

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-colored rather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses that alter this picture. We show that greater communicative precision for warm than for cool colors, and greater communicative need, may both be explained by perceptual structure. However, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also show that color naming across languages bears signs of communicative need beyond what would be predicted by perceptual structure alone. We conclude that color naming is shaped both by perceptual structure, as has traditionally been argued, and by patterns of communicative need, as argued by Gibson et al. - although for reasons other than those they advanced.