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"Children learn their mother tongue by communicating with people in their environment. By playing and experimenting with language, they try to interpret the intentions of their interlocutors. In this way, they gradually learn to understand and use linguistic constructs. This process, in which language is acquired through interaction and meaningful context, constitutes the core of human language acquisition"

Katrien Beuls Professor, Faculty of Computer Science, UNamur

"The current generation of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, learn language in a very different way," continues Paul Van Eecke. "By observing in huge quantities of text which words often appear in close proximity to each other, they learn to generate texts that are often indistinguishable from human texts. This leads to extremely powerful models in many forms of text generation, from text synthesis or translation to question answering, but which at the same time have a number of inherent limitations. They are thus prone to hallucinations and biases, often struggle with forms of human reasoning, and require huge amounts of data and energy to build and use."

The researchers propose an alternative model in which artificial agents learn language as humans do: by participating in meaningful communicative interactions in their environment. In a series of experiments, they show how these agents develop linguistic constructs directly related to their environment and sensory perceptions. This leads to linguistic models that :

  • Are less prone to hallucinations and biases because their understanding of language is based on direct interaction with the world.
  • Manage data and energy more efficiently, leaving a smaller ecological footprint.
  • Are more grounded in meaning and intention, enabling them to understand language and context in a more human way.

"The integration of communicative and situated interactions into AI models is a crucial step in the development of the next generation of linguistic models. This research offers a promising route to linguistic technologies that approximate the way humans understand and use language," the researchers conclude.

Read the researchers' article

Source: Katrien Beuls, Paul Van Eecke; Humans Learn Language from Situated Communicative Interactions. What about Machines?Computational Linguistics 2024; 50 (4): 1277-1311. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00534