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Toddlers May Learn Language By Data Mining
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Toddlers' brains can effortlessly do what the most powerful computers with the most sophisticated software cannot: learn language simply by hearing it used. A ground-breaking new theory postulates that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining. Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image. After viewing various combinations of words and images, however, the children were surprisingly successful at figuring out which word went with which picture. Yu and Smith say it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what. Yu says if they can identify key factors involved in this form of learning and how it can be manipulated, they might be able to make learning languages easier for children and adults. Understanding children's learning mechanisms could also further machine learning."
...I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA. I majored in linguistics, and even way back then, it was well understood by researchers in language acquisition that context played a significant role in both first and second language acquisition, but especially first. A form of data mining may well be part of the mechanics of what was happening in the experiment, but the whole way it was set up, and the way the subjects figured out what word went with what picture, had a lot to do with context. I don't mean to put down their research - this is really quite interesting - but it's also not quite the huge deal TFA seemst o suggest it is.
cognizant factors laughing mainly if no can wormhole torsion mostly antibacterial softly
got that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is why I've never talked to either of my children in "baby talk". I've always talked to them like they're adults (minus swearing and things like that) and as a result my eldest talks like a six or seven year (she's two) and my youngest... well she's just a few months old but she knows mom and dad. It really is interesting to see the difference between the children that aren't expected to speak and those that are. My eldest has never gotten away with pointing and grunting for things, she always had to at least try to say what she wanted and we'll do the same for the baby when she's around the right age. What kills me though is that the eldest is starting to use sarcasm.... that just blows my mind when she does it. Children's minds are the most amazing things, when people say sponge that doesn't even begin to describe it. Given a lot of patience and a lot of work from the parents children can learn at incredible rates. I only wish that I knew more languages so that I could teach them at this young age so they'd be fluent, I'm really considering taking a job in Europe partially for that reason and cultural exposure for them.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Reverse-engineer the toddler's word-image processing algorithm, and reimplement it on a computer. Supposedly, if you have enough different simple test cases, you can just do some analysis and figure out how the toddlers do it.
I believe "????" and "PROFIT" go in there somewhere.
Have you ever watched a toddler try to talk? Nothing about learning to talk is "effortless" anyone who says so either not a parent, or not thinking clearly.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
...Children have freakishly absorbent brains! Seriously, hasn't this type of info been pretty much common knowledge for like ever? Just because you attach a buzzword to it, doesn't make it a new discovery. Where's the study showing that babies and puppies have 'upward marketability'?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Data mining is just a new word for discovering statistical associations in data. Of course, children learn words by learning statistical associations between images and speech sounds; that's pretty much a tautology. I mean, what's the alternative? Divine inspiration? Toddlers running around with dictionaries?
My sister had a kid a year ago and the only mining I ever see him doing is in his nose.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
that the human mind works very much like a binary computer and has its characteristics from duality and negation. It's basically a statistical machine, and once we have a clear *model* of how it learns, the educational process will become far more efficient, and this is a positive confirmation.
..."
..."
Take the following sentence as objective-subjective proof of the statistical nature:
* "It often is used and thought of
How often have you seen the three first words (images) in that order?
Isn't it more common to see them in this order?:
** "It is often used and thought of
Anyone here familiar with the Nicaraguan school for deaf-mute children in the early eighties?
The first phase of the project was to teach these children the sign-alphabet. After this, I'm not sure if they were going to teach the full english or spanish sign-language (seems there's not an international standard for sign-language), but the point is that after a year, the experiment was deemed a failure and abandoned.
Then a couple of years later, reports started trickling out of these deaf-mute children exchanging unintelligible gibberish with their hands. A couple of researchers flew in, and were astonished to discover that these kids, using the sign-alphabet as a starting point, had developed a complete, unique language of their own in just two or three years - the first ever documented report of a fully formed, structured language bursting spontaneously into existence. These children are, of course, now adults in their thirties, still in touch with each other and communicating amongst themselves in the language they invented three decades ago.
And now, for something completely different...
Terrence McKenna, that lovable old psychonaut, postulated an empirical assumption in the eighties and nineties - language was created over many generations, via deep psilocybin trance rituals, of which the whole tribe partook. One by one, abstract concepts emerged in the back and forth play between members of the tribe, led and refereed of course by the shaman.
The Nicaraguan kids have poked serious holes into McKenna's whimsical idea. As it turns out, children can develop fully formed languages almost overnight! And so, with concrete data, a new possibility has arisen - languages burst upon the world from the mouths of children, and never mind the psychedelic substances.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
...researchers recommend that parents read regularly to their children. Film at 11.
The article basically says that they've discovered that people learn multiple words at a time instead of one at a time. Sure, I could see this as being something interesting, but beyond helping baby Einstein learn how to talk slightly sooner than he would have otherwise, I don't really see how this is that important.
I'm a parent in a bilingual family. (Finnish & Swedish, two fundamentally different languages.) One of the more interesting things is the way my kids pick up grammar. I speak Swedish to the kids (my first language) and my wife speaks Finnish. The kids (even our younger one and a half year olds) understand both languages more or less perfectly, but they do tend to mess up grammar and sometimes words between them. Every now and then they use the grammar of one language to conjugate a word from the other. It's all pretty interesting.
But I personally believe that the human brain does a hell of a lot more data mining than we give it credit for. There's a damn good reason why things seem clearer after a good night's sleep. The human brain is designed for massively parallel information processing, and we can't possibly handle it all in a conscious processing context. A lot happens behind the scenes. I'm guessing it's going to be quite some time still until we can fully understand the "inner workings" of the human brain.
.: Max Romantschuk
This is how the Rosetta Stone software works, if anyone was ever curious. Several pictures are shown with a phrase in the foreign language - no translation at all. You have to pick the right one. It goes through permutations of the phrase with different pictures and you eventually learn what each of the words means. It's very effective, much better than the rote memorization that I had to do in school.
Love sees no species.
"Now that it's been labeled, some will feel like we've got a better handle on it than we did before."
What is it called when a man and a woman get together alone in a room and start joining their bodies in erotic and exciting positions?
In related news, privacy activists are heavily protesting this new form of data mining and are pushing Congress to mandate that all newborns come with an opt-out check box and a Privacy Policy.
This isn't proof that children acquire language by some sort of data mining process.
When children start coming up with overregularizations like "goed" instead of "went" or "playses" in place of "plays," that kind of attempt at applying regular morphological rules to irregular items, is when you might say they are acquiring language via data mining. I.e., they hear a form used often enough that it becomes part of their knowledge about words, to the extent that that form is unconsciously applied even to make words they have certainly never heard in adult speech before.
(Disclaimer:
1. I will graduate this May with a B.A. in linguistics.
2. First language acquisition is not wholly understood as of yet, but suffice it to say that it's more complicated and there are many more factors involved than the article makes it seem.
3. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding what they mean by "data mining.")
After reading this article, and so many like it, it's simply amazing to see God's perfect design for us. My wife and I are less than a month from having our first child, and I can't wait to see how she will change everyday. I'll definitely be looking for early language development programs.
Google
I'd like to see them do this with a language uncommon to the children in order to control for how much language they hear at home or how advanced their usage is.
Kids learn to talk by listening to their parents... When you're around him, you talk wrong. So now it's like his first day in school and he raises his hand and says, "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The comprehensible input theory by Stephen Krashen has been around for a long time. This is really no different, but just changes the angle of entry into the theory.
Put identity in the browser.
I for one welcome our new data mining toddler overlords!
This sounds a lot like the computer science concept of Reinforcement learning.
From Wikipedia:
However, I'm not sure whether the rewards relating to the reinforced learning would be extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. I'm just throwing out ideas here, but perhaps it could be related to endorphins (or some like that) being released when a baby sees something it recognizes(correctly predicts).
[Note that I don't really know a lot about AI or biology, and am just forming various hypothesis.]
When I stubbed my toe the other day in front of my 2 1/2 year old, it was more like a quarry. Didn't have to dig far for something interesting to learn there...
Task Mangler
The English->Arabic lanaguage path essentially learns how to translate by looking at a whole bunch of examples. Yes, the Google Algorithm sometimes screws up (the recent "Heath Ledger is dead" translation thing) but then again, so do toddlers.
i won't comment on the tasteless joke, but ... nigger dicks? wtf??
Funny, this. Mainly how irrelevant stuff overruns the editors. Okay, kdawson is off the RedMond-track ...
/. that research has established without doubt that 2 legs are suitable to walk.
Waiting for the day, when we read in
I'd like to ask, how abstracta fit into this mine-field of links between content and images.
In any case, this smells like Chomsky**2, and the old man himself will be up in arms.
I believe this is why it is important to start reading illustrated books to your children as soon as possible.
I surely picked the wrong place ... :(
Researchers in Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain uses highly complex statistics to learn language. [...] Assistant professor Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith, professor and chair of the department [...]
(http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6382.html)
I sincerely hope we'll be seeing more and better stuff coming along from these Brain Scientists. (Am I the only one with an indelible association with some Flying Circus when I read these words?)
They big key point in this article is we're understanding how we're learning. You know who can't learn too well yet? Computers. Who learns much better than them? We do. Learning how we learn (weird.) is a huge step in technological advancement, more specifically in the advancement of A.I. Maybe with this, the I won't be so A.
-Kevin Stanislawski.
since when is old news considered new and exciting research?
As research goes, this ranks along with the "discovery" that alcohol makes students drunk.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
can the babies run linux? Sorry.
You live and learn. At least, you live.
The world will someday come to accept his genius. Truly a shame that he died so young.
Do what my mum did: buy albums of kids songs in foreign languages (in my case only French). When I was about four, I could sing in a perfect French accent. Didn't have a clue what I was saying, but the accent was there. When I started learning French about 8 years later I had no problems. My ear was primed and my mouth was primed, so I could handle the sound system without problems, and it's the sounding like a foreigner/lunatic that frustrates most people when learning languages.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Here are some videolectures on this topic: http://videolectures.net/icml07_tenenbaum_bmhi/ this one i find very insightful. http://videolectures.net/mlcs07_goldwater_bat/ http://videolectures.net/mlcs07_perfors_aba/
I always thought that this is a well known fact.
Almost my whole vocabulary(In my mother tongue- Hebrew, and in English) came from reading-books/watching-movies with words that I don't understand and figuring them out from the context.
It's a much better way for me then trying to memorize something out of the dictionary.
If an infant hears the word cat more in the presence of a cat than a bird, and hears the word apple more in the presence of an apple than a cat, then the association cat-word == cat-thing is going to be stonger than cat-word == bird-thing, apple-word == cat-thing.
i.e. (A, B) => assoc(A, B)++ ---- The ONE MILLION DOLLAR formula!
It doesn't make any difference how many words / objects or other sensory inputs are presented together - just strengthen the associations of all co-present stimuli (this is simply how the brain works - no thought required), and those that occur most frequently will naturally end up with the strongest associations. Brains presumably evolved this way for cause-effect association (i.e. environment prediction), but it works just as well for associating words with objects etc.
This is simple strenthening of associations by repeated exposure (of course many other mechanisms such as focus also come into play), although if you can get a $1M grant by calling it data mining then I guess more power to you.
It always equates to true, so I guess Shakespeare was onto something.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
What else is this but learning through reinforment? Links between neurons become stronger, the more often the connection is shown or used. Invalid links fall into oblivion. What remains is the correct object relationship. No statistics or data mining necessary. It's all in Prof. Dörner's Psi-Theory.
...to acquire language. Film at 11!
Unless my layman's understanding of neural network research is badly wrong (IANAAIR) we knew this already. You set up a neural network and throw it a bunch of inputs, reward it for the right outputs, and away you go.
Yes, this is also how you build scorecards and so on in the world of data mining (I -am- an expert on that, or at least on the systems and infrastructure required to carry out this kind of analysis). But we knew that too.
So really the headline is "AI, analytics ivory towers meet, swap war stories" - and if you're telling me that this hasn't happened already at some point post-Minsky and post-Kimball, I am disgusted with both communities and I will be banging their heads together.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
My little cousin (well she is almost out of high-school now) was talking (and also understanding) some perfectly understandable and grammatically correct English at around 5 or 6 years of age.
She had learned it all by watching Cartoon Network every day. She passively picked up a foreign language from TV before she learned to read or write.
Besides the fact that kids enjoy cartoons more than say... movies or sit-coms, cartoon voice actors usually speak a much more grammatically correct language then the one you can pick up on the other TV shows or even news.
Oh and yeah... Both me and my cousin are Bosnians from Bosnia with no direct family or neighborhood ties to any language other than Bosnian.
Damn do I wish we had satellite TV back when I was growing up.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
In short, it stored meta information about objects and relations and then used a database and some inference algorithms to resolve these entities to protolanguage "nouns" and "verbs."
Here is workshop paper on the research.
...and then imagine child services and FBI knocking at your door.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Very interesting, thanks for posting that.
When my daughter was an infant (8-12 months) we taught her to communicate simple concepts like "please" and "thank you" with sign language. She could ask for things before she could say what they were. No she won't shut up (two-and-a-half years old).
To the article, It's not really surprising that kids absorb information. What I find surprising is how my daughter can so quickly pick something up after seeing it only once (i.e. curse words, my bad) or how to open or do something that's "mommy-daddy only."
...someone used the "film at 11" correctly today on Slashdot. News at 11.
Toddlers learn by datamining,
::Therefore, everyone who works at Google is a toddler.
Google uses datamining in their GMail application,
Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image.
Serious question: How do you get these babies to give informed consent to having their brains tossed around like salad?
... but with two small kids in the family, one 4 years old and the other 17 months old, babies and toddlers pick up things INCREDIBLY fast. Accomplishments that would take near-inconceivable amounts of processing power, memory and storage to do with current AI algorithms are done by kids under two years old every single day.
:)
It makes me think that human brains are either hard-wired from birth for language and cognition, or have an astounding amount of capability compared to *anything* in computing, even on the distant horizon.
But, of course, the linguistic-cognitive miracles still get spaghetti sauce all over the table at dinner.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
But that doesn't make it conscious data-mining.
it is clear from TFA that data mining simply means *beginning with a pile of data* rather than any particular manner of coping with it. The fault lies with the term rather than TFAs abuse of it. Like a lot of words that have been commandeered to stand as terms of art for programming and current tech, they mean in their new context what the interlocutor happens to think they mean. To whit:
architecture
ontology
object
virtual
And a host of others.
illegitimii non ingravare
Every time a car pulls up next to us now he looks at it and says "Dear God!" And the last time his mom had to slam on brakes he giggled and said "What the fuck, huh?" And when she shrieked at him, that was just gasoline on the fire. For the rest of drive home all he could do was giggle and say "What the fuck, Mommy? Mommy? What the fuck, Mommy?"
This is not improving my sex life.
This is not my sandwich.
Funny, Insightful, whatever - c'mon, something positive for parent please :-)
I am already reading books to my daughter. She will be born in about 3 months.
So far is has been small children's books, but I keep telling my wife that if we start her early on The Wheel of Time series now, she can be ready for when the last book comes out, post Robert Jordan!
The reading is fun, but I also rub lotion on the wife's ginormous, my new favorite word, belly while one of us reads.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
My ear was primed and my mouth was primed, so I could handle the sound system without problems.
So thats how you lip read, huh?
Ouvrez la porte de compartiment de cosse, HAL.
Je suis désolé Dave, j'aie peur que je ne peux pas faire cela.
Is it just me, or is Captain Obvious striking on Slashdot more and more frequently lately?