COLT seminar - Monday 17th February 12:00h, Sandro Pezzelle
COLT seminar - Monday 17th February 12:00h, Sandro Pezzelle
Modeling gradable adjectives leveraging visual contexts
- Speaker: Sandro Pezzelle
- When: Monday 17th February, 12:00h
- Where: 52.701
There is no doubt that planets are big things. Among the planets of our Solar System, however, Mars is unquestionably a “small” planet -- though not the smallest, while Saturn is definitely a “big” one -- though not the biggest. As for Neptune, either adjectives could apply to it. This example highlights some crucial properties of gradable adjectives such as “big” and “small”: they are context-dependent (their interpretation involves applying a statistical threshold function), and considered to be vague (people could disagree on whether they apply or not in a given context).
In this talk, he will present a novel, cognitively-inspired dataset aimed at testing how the context-dependent and vague meaning of “big” and “small” can be learned from visually-grounded contexts. First, I will explore the effectiveness of several multimodal models on the tasks included in the dataset, and analyze the generalization and compositional abilities of the best performing system. Second, he will investigate how human speakers handle borderline cases, and explore the impact of asking clarification questions to align to someone else’s interpretation.
17.02.2020