Towards Interactive Language Modeling
This work pioneers a new research direction that could make language models more versatile and impactful for downstream applications, though it is currently incremental as it only shows initial steps.
The paper tackles the lack of explicit interaction in artificial language modeling, inspired by human language acquisition, and presents a road map and initial feasibility demonstration for interactive language modeling.
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling -- which also targets the acquisition of human language, yet by artificial models. Moreover, an interactive approach to language modeling has the potential to make language models substantially more versatile and to considerably impact downstream applications. Motivated by these considerations, we pioneer the space of interactive language modeling. As a first contribution we present a road map in which we detail the steps that need to be taken towards interactive language modeling. We then lead by example and take the first steps on this road map, showing the initial feasibility of our approach. As such, this work aims to be the start of a larger research agenda on interactive language modeling.