Comparatives, Quantifiers, Proportions: a Multi-Task Model for the Learning of Quantities from Vision
Abstract
The present work investigates whether different quantification mechanisms (set comparison, vague quantification, and proportional estimation) can be jointly learned from visual scenes by a multi-task computational model. The motivation is that, in humans, these processes underlie the same cognitive, non-symbolic ability, which allows an automatic estimation and comparison of set magnitudes. We show that when information about lower-complexity tasks is available, the higher-level proportional task becomes more accurate than when performed in isolation. Moreover, the multi-task model is able to generalize to unseen combinations of target/non-target objects. Consistently with behavioral evidence showing the interference of absolute number in the proportional task, the multi-task model no longer works when asked to provide the number of target objects in the scene.- Anthology ID:
- N18-1039
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Editors:
- Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 419–430
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N18-1039
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N18-1039
- Cite (ACL):
- Sandro Pezzelle, Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, and Raffaella Bernardi. 2018. Comparatives, Quantifiers, Proportions: a Multi-Task Model for the Learning of Quantities from Vision. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 419–430, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Comparatives, Quantifiers, Proportions: a Multi-Task Model for the Learning of Quantities from Vision (Pezzelle et al., NAACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/N18-1039.pdf
- Code
- sandropezzelle/multitask-quant