Schedule

The selection of papers listed below is tentative. Please see the guidelines for details about the class format.

Some of the links require library access. Please use Cornell Library’s Passkey for off-campus access.

Date Topic Additional materials
Aug 30 Introductions and format overview
Sep 01 Can Neural Machine Translation be Improved with User Feedback? / Kreutzer et al. 2018  
Sep 06 No class (Labor Day)  
Sep 08 A Contextual Bandit Bake-off / Bietti et al. 2018  
Sep 13 "  
Sep 15 Personalizing Natural Language Understanding using Multi-armed Bandits and Implicit Feedback / Moerchen et al. 2020  
Sep 20 Core Knowledge, Language, and Number / Spelke 2017  
Sep 22 "  
Sep 27 The social bases of language acquisition / Tomasello 1992  
Sep 29 "  
Oct 04 An integrated theory of language production and comprehension / Pickering and Garrod 2013  
Oct 06 Guest talk by Robert Hawkins (Princeton) McCarthy et al. 2021
Hawkins et al. 2021
Oct 11 No class (fall break)  
Oct 13 Extending rational models of communication from beliefs to actions / Sumers et al. 2021 RSA Intro
Oct 18 Guest talk by Julia Kreutzer (Google) Graves et al. 2017
Oct 20 No class  
Oct 25 Sumers et al. 2021 (cotd.)  
  Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework / Branavan et al. 2011  
Oct 27 "  
Nov 01 "  
  Leveraging Language to Learn Program Abstractions and Search Heuristics / Wong et al. 2021  
Nov 03 "  
Nov 08 No class (EMNLP)  
Nov 10 MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks / Bara et al. 2021  
Nov 15 "  
Nov 17 Guest talk by Catherine Wong (MIT)  
Nov 22 Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures / Liu et al. 2021  
Nov 24 No class (Thanksgiving break)  
Nov 29 Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures / Liu et al. 2021 [contd.]  
Dec 01 Project presentations  
Dec 06 Project presentations  

Tentative List of Papers

Bandits and Continual Learning
  1. Can Neural Machine Translation be Improved with User Feedback? / Kreutzer et al. 2018
  2. A Contextual Bandit Bake-off / Bietti et al. 2018
  3. Personalizing Natural Language Understanding using Multi-armed Bandits and Implicit Feedback / Moerchen et al. 2020
  4. A Shared Task on Bandit Learning for Machine Translation / Sokolov et al. 2017
Language Acquisition Through Interaction and Implications to Machine Learning
  1. Core Knowledge, Language, and Number / Spelke 2017
  2. The social bases of language acquisition / Tomasello 1992
  3. An integrated theory of language production and comprehension / Pickering and Garrod 2013
  4. Strategies for Communicating / Clark 1978
  5. Developing language in a developing body: the relationship between motor development and language development / Iverson 2010
  6. Conversation and Language Acquisition: A pragmatic approach / Clark 2017
  7. On the Critical Role of Conventions in Adaptive Human-AI Collaboration / Shih et al. 2021
  8. Extending rational models of communication from beliefs to actions / Sumers et al. 2021
Language and Reasoning Structure
  1. Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework / Branavan et al. 2011
  2. Word meanings across languages support efficient communication / Regier et al. 2014
  3. Grounding Language to Entities and Dynamics for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning / Hanjie et al. 2021
  4. Leveraging Language to Learn Program Abstractions and Search Heuristics / Wong et al. 2021
  5. Hierarchical Decision Making by Generating and Following Natural Language Instructions / Hu et al. 2019
  6. Learning with Latent Language / Andreas et al. 2017
Recent Work in Language Grounding
  1. MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks / Bara et al. 2021
  2. Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures / Liu et al. 2021
  3. Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments / Udagawa and Aizawa 2021
  4. Language Conditioned Imitation Learning over Unstructured Data / Lynch and Sermanet 2021
  5. Communication-based Evaluation for Natural Language Generation / Newman et al. 2019