[HN Gopher] New algorithm discovers language just by watching vi...
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       New algorithm discovers language just by watching videos
        
       Author : geox
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2024-06-13 19:43 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.csail.mit.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.csail.mit.edu)
        
       | julius wrote:
       | Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.05629v1
        
         | firtoz wrote:
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05629v1
        
       | akasakahakada wrote:
       | Linguists e.g. Chomsky: No you can't. Proof is left as an
       | exercise.
        
         | maest wrote:
         | I think Chomsky's position is that _humans_ are primed for
         | language, but it doesn't mean there exists no system that can
         | learn language from 0.
         | 
         | Also, the ability to understand language is a spectrum, not a
         | binary quality.
        
           | qntty wrote:
           | Yeah the argument is that there is a poverty of stimulus (not
           | enough training data) in the case of children. The same
           | doesn't apply to ML models which need an abundance of
           | stimulus.
        
         | sudosysgen wrote:
         | Word-object correspondances can obviously be learnt from
         | observation in theory - it is widely accepted that there is
         | enough information to learn such correspondances, even on a
         | limited dataset. The argument by linguists is about grammar,
         | not vocabulary.
         | 
         | Chomsky's argument is exactly the opposite, that vocabulary is
         | learnt from scratch, but that the framework for grammar is
         | innate.
        
       | jowea wrote:
       | Intersting. How long till we have universal translators and/or
       | can figure out the Voynich manuscript?
        
         | ImHereToVote wrote:
         | Right after you have no mouth and must scream.
        
       | jebarker wrote:
       | It's a stretch to call this discovering language. It's learning
       | the correlations between sounds, spoken words and visual
       | features. That's a long way from learning language.
        
       | wjb3 wrote:
       | Imagine an autonomous robot programmed with this algorithm just
       | walking around in the world learning about it. So excited about
       | the future!
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-14 23:00 UTC)