AI that can learn the patterns of human language Posted on : Sep 03 - 2022

Human languages are notoriously complex, and linguists have long thought it would be impossible to teach a machine how to analyze speech sounds and word structures in the way human investigators do.

But researchers at MIT, Cornell University, and McGill University have taken a step in this direction. They have demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that can learn the rules and patterns of human languages on its own.

When given words and examples of how those words change to express different grammatical functions (like tense, case, or gender) in one language, this machine-learning model comes up with rules that explain why the forms of those words change. For instance, it might learn that the letter “a” must be added to end of a word to make the masculine form feminine in Serbo-Croatian.

This model can also automatically learn higher-level language patterns that can apply to many languages, enabling it to achieve better results.

The researchers trained and tested the model using problems from linguistics textbooks that featured 58 different languages. Each problem had a set of words and corresponding word-form changes. The model was able to come up with a correct set of rules to describe those word-form changes for 60 percent of the problems.

This system could be used to study language hypotheses and investigate subtle similarities in the way diverse languages transform words. It is especially unique because the system discovers models that can be readily understood by humans, and it acquires these models from small amounts of data, such as a few dozen words. And instead of using one massive dataset for a single task, the system utilizes many small datasets, which is closer to how scientists propose hypotheses — they look at multiple related datasets and come up with models to explain phenomena across those datasets.

“One of the motivations of this work was our desire to study systems that learn models of datasets that is represented in a way that humans can understand. Instead of learning weights, can the model learn expressions or rules? And we wanted to see if we could build this system so it would learn on a whole battery of interrelated datasets, to make the system learn a little bit about how to better model each one,” says Kevin Ellis ’14, PhD ’20, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University and lead author of the paper.

Joining Ellis on the paper are MIT faculty members Adam Albright, a professor of linguistics; Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor and associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of CSAIL; as well as senior author View more