Language acquisition in vector space
Anders Søgaard · Intercultural Pragmatics · 2025
Abstract Language models are mathematical functions and, as such, induce vector spaces in which input is embedded. Comparing the point clouds of concept vectors across such language models and similar computer vision models, we see surprising similarities. This sheds new light on the Innateness Debate. Much linguistic structure can be induced from extra-linguistic data. Language models are generally thought to be too sample-inefficient to be good models of language acquisition, but what about language models initialized by computer vision models?