We analyze a corpus of referential communication through the lens of quantitative models of speaker reasoning.Different models place different emphases on linguistic reasoning and collaborative reasoning.This leads models to make different assessments of the risks and rewards of using specific utterances in specific contexts.By fitting a latent variable model to the corpus, we can exhibit utterances that give systematic evidence of the diverse kinds of reasoning speakers employ, and build integrated models that recognize not only speaker reference but also speaker reasoning.

We study transfer learning in convolutional network architectures applied to the task of recognizing audio, such as environmental sound events and speech commands. Our key finding is that not only is it possible to transfer representations from an unrelated task like environmental sound classification to a voice-focused task like speech command recognition, but also that doing so improves accuracies significantly. We also investigate the effect of increased model capacity for transfer learning audio, by first validating known results from the field of Computer Vision of achieving better accuracies with increasingly deeper networks on two audio datasets: UrbanSound8k and Google Speech Commands. Then we propose a simple multiscale input representation using dilated convolutions and show that it is able to aggregate larger contexts and increase classification performance. Further, the models trained using a combination of transfer learning and multiscale input representations need only 50% of the training data to achieve similar accuracies as a freshly trained model with 100% of the training data. Finally, we demonstrate a positive interaction effect for the multiscale input and transfer learning, making a case for the joint application of the two techniques.

A key component in surface realization in natural language generation is to choose concrete syntactic relationships to express a target meaning. We develop a new method for syntactic choice based on learning a stochastic tree grammar in a neural architecture. This framework can exploit state-of-the-art methods for modeling word sequences and generalizing across vocabulary. We also induce embeddings to generalize over elementary tree structures and exploit a tree recurrence over the input structure to model long-distance influences between NLG choices. We evaluate the models on the task of linearizing unannotated dependency trees, documenting the contribution of our modeling techniques to improvements in both accuracy and run time.

Natural language meanings allow speakers to encode important real-world distinctions, but corpora of grounded language use also reveal that speakers categorize the world in different ways and describe situations with different terminology. To learn meanings from data, we therefore need to link underlying representations of meaning to models of speaker judgment and speaker choice. This paper describes a new approach to this problem: we model variability through uncertainty in categorization boundaries and distributions over preferred vocabulary. We apply the approach to a large data set of color descriptions, where statistical evaluation documents its accuracy. The results are available as a Lexicon of Uncertain Color Standards (LUX), which supports future efforts in grounded language understanding and generation by probabilistically mapping 829 English color descriptions to potentially context-sensitive regions in HSV color space.