Extended Abstract

Word Learning as Category Formation

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Abstract

A fundamental question in word learning is how, given only evidence about what objects a word has previously referred to, children are able to generalize the total class (Smith, 1979; Xu and Tenenbaum, 2007). E.g. how a child ends up knowing that \\textit{`poodle\'} only picks out a specific subset of dogs rather than the whole class and vice versa. Here we present a computational model of word learning which accounts for a wide range of previously conflicting experimental findings.

Keywords: Word Learning, Category Generalization

How to Cite:

Caplan, S., (2018) “Word Learning as Category Formation”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 1(1), 174-177. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R54X560G