The Fast and the Flexible: Training Neural Networks to Learn to Follow Instructions from Small Data

Rezka Leonandya, Dieuwke Hupkes, Elia Bruni, Germán Kruszewski


Abstract
Learning to follow human instructions is a long-pursued goal in artificial intelligence. The task becomes particularly challenging if no prior knowledge of the employed language is assumed while relying only on a handful of examples to learn from. Work in the past has relied on hand-coded components or manually engineered features to provide strong inductive biases that make learning in such situations possible. In contrast, here we seek to establish whether this knowledge can be acquired automatically by a neural network system through a two phase training procedure: A (slow) offline learning stage where the network learns about the general structure of the task and a (fast) online adaptation phase where the network learns the language of a new given speaker. Controlled experiments show that when the network is exposed to familiar instructions but containing novel words, the model adapts very efficiently to the new vocabulary. Moreover, even for human speakers whose language usage can depart significantly from our artificial training language, our network can still make use of its automatically acquired inductive bias to learn to follow instructions more effectively.
Anthology ID:
W19-0419
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers
Month:
May
Year:
2019
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Vera Demberg
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
223–234
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0419/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-0419
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rezka Leonandya, Dieuwke Hupkes, Elia Bruni, and Germán Kruszewski. 2019. The Fast and the Flexible: Training Neural Networks to Learn to Follow Instructions from Small Data. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers, pages 223–234, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Fast and the Flexible: Training Neural Networks to Learn to Follow Instructions from Small Data (Leonandya et al., IWCS 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0419.pdf
Code
 rezkaaufar/fast-and-flexible