7 accepted papers
Accurately simulating human opinion dynamics is crucial for understanding a variety of societal phenomena, including polarization and the spread of misinformation. However, the agent-based models (ABMs) commonly used for such simulations often over-simplify human behavior. We propose a new approach…
Accounts of human language processing have long appealed to implicit “situation models” that enrich comprehension with relevant but unstated world knowledge. Here, we apply causal intervention techniques to recent transformer models to analyze performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), wher…
We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior r…
Language differs dramatically from context to context. To some degree, large language models like GPT-3 account for such variation by conditioning on strings of initial input text, or prompts. However, prompting can be ineffective when contexts are sparse, out-of-sample, or extra-textual. In this pa…
Sampling is a promising bottom-up method for exposing what generative models have learned about language, but it remains unclear how to generate representative samples from popular masked language models (MLMs) like BERT. The MLM objective yields a dependency network with no guarantee of consistent…
An overarching goal of natural language processing is to enable machines to communicate seamlessly with humans. However, natural language can be ambiguous or unclear. In cases of uncertainty, humans engage in an interactive process known as repair: asking questions and seeking clarification until th…
In this work we explore how fine-grained differences between the shapes of common objects are expressed in language, grounded on 2D and/or 3D object representations. We first build a large scale, carefully controlled dataset of human utterances each of which refers to a 2D rendering of a 3D CAD mode…