Experience Grounds Language

Yonatan Bisk, Ari Holtzman, Jesse Thomason, Jacob Andreas, Yoshua Bengio, Joyce Chai, Mirella Lapata, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jonathan May, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Nicolas Pinto, Joseph Turian


Abstract
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle tasks after being trained on text alone, successful linguistic communication relies on a shared experience of the world. It is this shared experience that makes utterances meaningful. Natural language processing is a diverse field, and progress throughout its development has come from new representational theories, modeling techniques, data collection paradigms, and tasks. We posit that the present success of representation learning approaches trained on large, text-only corpora requires the parallel tradition of research on the broader physical and social context of language to address the deeper questions of communication.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.703
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8718–8735
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.703
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.703
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yonatan Bisk, Ari Holtzman, Jesse Thomason, Jacob Andreas, Yoshua Bengio, Joyce Chai, Mirella Lapata, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jonathan May, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Nicolas Pinto, and Joseph Turian. 2020. Experience Grounds Language. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8718–8735, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Experience Grounds Language (Bisk et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.emnlp-main.703.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938907
Data
Penn Treebank