One example: you know that thing where I point at a cow and say “cow”, and then the toddler next to me points at another cow and is like “cow?”, and I nod and smile? That’s the thing we want to understand. How the heck does the toddler manage to correctly point at a second cow, on their first try, with only one example of me saying “cow”? (Note that same question still applies if they take a few tries, or have heard me use the word a few times.)
The post basically says that the toddler does a bunch of unsupervised structure learning, and then has a relatively small set of candidate targets, so when they hear the word once they can assign the word to the appropriate structure. And then we’re interested in questions like “what are those structures?”, and interoperability helps narrow down the possibilities for what those structures could be.
… and I don’t think I’ve yet fully articulated the general version of the problem here, but the cow example is at least one case where “just take the magic box to be the identity function” fails to answer our question.
One example: you know that thing where I point at a cow and say “cow”, and then the toddler next to me points at another cow and is like “cow?”, and I nod and smile? That’s the thing we want to understand. How the heck does the toddler manage to correctly point at a second cow, on their first try, with only one example of me saying “cow”? (Note that same question still applies if they take a few tries, or have heard me use the word a few times.)
The post basically says that the toddler does a bunch of unsupervised structure learning, and then has a relatively small set of candidate targets, so when they hear the word once they can assign the word to the appropriate structure. And then we’re interested in questions like “what are those structures?”, and interoperability helps narrow down the possibilities for what those structures could be.
… and I don’t think I’ve yet fully articulated the general version of the problem here, but the cow example is at least one case where “just take the magic box to be the identity function” fails to answer our question.