ICS Colloquium: Ellie Pavlick, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Linguistics, Brown University

Title: What came first, the sum or the parts? Emergent compositionality in neural networks Abstract: Decades of research in cognitive science and AI have focused on compositionality as a hallmark property of the human mind. This focus can seem to frame the question as though we must classify systems as either compositional or idiomatic, cognitive or associative. In this talk, i describe a set of related but different empirical studies of how neural networks achieve, or fail to achieve, compositional behavior. I argue that these findings point to a middle ground in which traditional “symbolic” compositionality can be seen as a special case which is emergent—but nonetheless qualitatively different—from a more general associative mechanism characteristic of neural networks. Bio: Ellie Pavlick is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Linguistics at Brown University and Director of NSF AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA). She leads the...