Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards Making Transformer-Based Language Models Learn How Children Learn, Yousra Mahdy

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Transformer-based Language Models (LMs), learn contextual meanings for words using a huge amount of unlabeled text data. These models show outstanding performance on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, what the LMs learn is far from what the meaning is for humans, partly due to the fact that humans can differentiate between concrete and abstract words, but language models make no distinction. Concrete words are words that have a physical representation in the world such as “chair”, while abstract words are ideas such as “democracy”. The process of learning word meanings starts from early childhood when children acquire their …