Word Acquisition in Neural Language Models

• Published in: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics Vol. 10; pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Chang, Tyler A., Bergen, Benjamin K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA MIT Press 28.01.2022; MIT Press Journals, The; The MIT Press
• Subjects: Child language; Children; Computational linguistics; Language acquisition; Language modeling; Learning curves; Native language acquisition; Training; Word frequency; Word length

We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., ). Drawing on studies of word acquisition in children, we evaluate mult...