Human Inspired Progressive Alignment and Comparative Learning for
  Grounded Word Acquisition
Yuwei Bao Barrett Martin Lattimer Joyce Chai
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual
process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their
first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition
through comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated a
small dataset that enables the computation models to compare the similarities
and differences of various attributes, learn to filter out and extract the
common information for each shared linguistic label. We frame the acquisition
of words as not only the information filtration process, but also as
representation-symbol mapping. This procedure does not involve a fixed
vocabulary size, nor a discriminative objective, and allows the models to
continually learn more concepts efficiently. Our results in controlled
experiments have shown the potential of this approach for efficient continual
learning of grounded words.