Learn Language Processing- How a Baby Does
By: Anuja Tayal
Tags: Classification, Brain, Naturallanguageprocessing, Pos Tagging, Sentiment Analysis

There is a great Chinese proverb- To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world. That’s how great a language is. But have you ever wondered how does our such a tiny brain learns a new language? The brain being too small, is the most complex processing system anyone has ever encountered. Today, we will understand how a baby and indirectly its brain learn his first letter, first word, and sentence. For simplicity, we will be training the baby to learn the English language.

Initially, a baby does not know anything. For him, everything is an image or a drawing. He does not know what is- A, B, or C. Treating all the characters as images, the baby is taught that this type of image, we will call it A. Remember how teachers/parents draw A with dots we had to trace them repeatedly. In short, we were training our brains to recognize different letters. The letters A-Z are called classes. And the process of teaching this image is A; this image is B is called classification.

Remember, our parents used to scold or beat us with flying slippers, or our parents were punishing us whenever we made a mistake. Similarly, when we behaved, we were appreciated and given hugs and chocolates. So what was happening? Our parents were training our brain- on what should be classified as good/bad behavior.

Till now, the baby has learned individual alphabets/letters- we call it character set. Next, remember our parents/teachers gifted us a book with A for apple, B for Boy, and C for cat with their respective pictures. Again a similar thing was happening. We had already seen those pictures, now we were associating a word with that image and simultaneously learning its spelling. Were you able to learn it in the first go? We took many iterations to learn. Some babies learned faster, while some at comparatively slow speed. Similar to the models trained.

The words we learned became our vocabulary. Whenever we see an out of vocabulary word, we tried different ways to learn that word- look it up in the dictionary, google, try to spell it, try to make a sentence out of it. In other words, you learned the meaning of the out of vocabulary word by gradually learning it and ultimately making it a part of your vocabulary. And Gradually, you expand the vocabulary.

Till now, what have you learned? Some words. Which words. The words that can be linked to an image. Like apple, cat, dog. Or words that had context. But does our English language consists of only these kinds of words? No. What did we learn afterward? We learned articles, determiners, verbs, plurals, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions. Some words don’t have individual meaning but make sense when used in a sentence. And then we gradually start to make simple sentences. A dog is chasing the baby on the playground. Can anyone identify parts of speech (pos) in the sentence

A,the- determiner,

dog, boy, playground- noun,

is, playing- verb

on- preposition

We learned different connectors and learned to start making a sentence. With time, we also assigned sentiments to the sentences. Sentiments- can be positive, highly positive, negative, neutral, etc. For example, I like mango is an example of positive sentiment in a simple sentence. Or sometimes there is complex sarcasm sentiment also. What sentiment will you assign to this sentence- I love being ignored. Or This phone has an excellent battery backup of just one hour.

When we become experts in learning one language and are trying to learn different languages, we could use two approaches. Try to learn a new language from scratch(Train a new model) or associate words from a new language to an already learned language (Transfer Learning). I used to find the latter method much more effective. What about you?

Our brain is so powerful and has so much memory that it can retain a vast amount of information. We have some memories of what happened to us 15 years back, like how I got hurt, childhood memories, but sometimes we cannot remember what we ate two nights ago. Have you ever wondered why? We tend to pay attention to those extreme emotions in our brain- like happy and sad memories as attention is all we need.