Computational Language Acquisition with Theory of Mind

TL;DR

This paper explores how integrating a Theory of Mind mechanism into language-learning agents enhances their language acquisition, especially under more challenging tasks, drawing inspiration from child language development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to computational language acquisition by incorporating a ToM-based internal listener model, demonstrating improved performance in language learning tasks.

Findings

Training with a ToM listener improves language performance.

Increased task difficulty leads to more fluent utterances.

ToM integration shows potential for advancing language acquisition models.

Abstract

Unlike current state-of-the-art language models, young children actively acquire language through interactions with their surrounding environment and caretakers. One mechanism that has been argued to be critical to language learning is the ability to infer the mental states of other agents in social environments, coined Theory of Mind (ToM) by Premack & Woodruff (1978). Drawing inspiration from the modern operationalized versions of ToM implemented in Rabinowitz et al. (2018) and Zhu et al. (2021), we build language-learning agents equipped with ToM, and measure its effects on the learning process. We model ToM by giving the speaker agent an internal listener model that is trained alongside the speaker and used to rerank potential utterances. We experiment with varying task difficulty, hypothesizing that models will acquire more complex language to adapt to stronger environmental pressures. We find that training speakers with a highly weighted ToM listener component leads to performance gains in our image referential game setting. We also find some evidence that increasing task difficulty in the training process results in more fluent and precise utterances in evaluation. This suggests the potential utility of further incorporating ToM, as well as other insights from child language acquisition, into computational models of language acquisition.