A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancy

被引:24
作者
LaTourrette, Alexander [1 ]
Waxman, Sandra R. [1 ,2 ]
机构
[1] Northwestern Univ, Dept Psychol, Evanston, IL 60208 USA
[2] Northwestern Univ, Inst Policy Res, Evanston, IL USA
基金
美国国家科学基金会; 美国国家卫生研究院;
关键词
category learning; conceptual development; language acquisition; language and thought; semi-supervised learning; OBJECT CATEGORIES; LANGUAGE; WORDS; INVITATIONS; CHILDREN; INPUT;
D O I
10.1111/desc.12736
中图分类号
B844 [发展心理学(人类心理学)];
学科分类号
040202 ;
摘要
There is considerable evidence that labeling supports infants' object categorization. Yet in daily life, most of the category exemplars that infants encounter will remain unlabeled. Inspired by recent evidence from machine learning, we propose that infants successfully exploit this sparsely labeled input through "semi-supervised learning." Providing only a few labeled exemplars leads infants to initiate the process of categorization, after which they can integrate all subsequent exemplars, labeled or unlabeled, into their evolving category representations. Using a classic novelty preference task, we introduced 2-year-old infants (n = 96) to a novel object category, varying whether and when its exemplars were labeled. Infants were equally successful whether all exemplars were labeled (fully supervised condition) or only the first two exemplars were labeled (semi-supervised condition), but they failed when no exemplars were labeled (unsupervised condition). Furthermore, the timing of the labeling mattered: when the labeled exemplars were provided at the end, rather than the beginning, of familiarization (reversed semi-supervised condition), infants failed to learn the category. This provides the first evidence of semi-supervised learning in infancy, revealing that infants excel at learning from exactly the kind of input that they typically receive in acquiring real-world categories and their names.
引用
收藏
页数:9
相关论文
共 58 条
[1]  
Althaus N., 2015, DEVELOPMENTAL SCI, P770, DOI [10.1111/desc, DOI 10.1111/DESC]
[2]   Labels constructively shape object categories in 10-month-old infants [J].
Althaus, Nadja ;
Westermann, Gert .
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, 2016, 151 :5-17
[3]   Labels Direct Infants' Attention to Commonalities during Novel Category Learning [J].
Althaus, Nadja ;
Mareschal, Denis .
PLOS ONE, 2014, 9 (07)
[4]  
[Anonymous], 1993, MONOGRAPHS SOC RES C
[5]  
[Anonymous], 2006, IEEE T NEURAL NETWOR
[6]  
[Anonymous], 2005, Time-sensitive Dirichlet process mixture models
[7]  
Balaban M.T., 1996, Proceedings of the 20th Boston University Conference on Language Development, V1, P483
[8]   Do words facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? [J].
Balaban, MT ;
Waxman, SR .
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, 1997, 64 (01) :3-26
[9]  
Balcan Maria-Florina, 2005, P ICML 2005 WORKSH L
[10]   Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later [J].
Cartmill, Erica A. ;
Armstrong, Benjamin F., III ;
Gleitman, Lila R. ;
Goldin-Meadow, Susan ;
Medina, Tamara N. ;
Trueswell, John C. .
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 2013, 110 (28) :11278-11283