Deep daxes: Mutual exclusivity arises through both learning biases and pragmatic strategies in neural networks

Understand

Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents has been taken to reflect a bias toward mutual exclusivity.

• This tendency may be advantageous both as (1) an ad-hoc referent selection heuristic to single out referents lacking a label and as (2) an organizing principle of lexical acquisition.
• This paper investigates under which circumstances cross-situational neural models can come to exhibit analogous behavior to children, focusing on these two possibilities and their interaction.
• To this end, we evaluate neural networks' on both symbolic data and, as a first, on large-scale image data.