A Formal Approach to Social Learning: Exploring Language Acquisition Through Imitation

The topic of this thesis is learning through social interaction, consisting of experiments that focus on word acquisition through imitation, and a formalism aiming to provide stronger theoretical foundations. The formalism is designed to encompass essentially any situation where a learner tries to figure out what a teacher wants it to do by interaction or observation. It groups learners that are interpreting a broad range of information sources under the same theoretical framework. A teachers demonstration, it’s eye gaze during a reproduction attempt and a teacher speech comment are all treated as the same type of information source. They can all tell the imitator what the demonstrator wants it to do, and they need to be interpreted in some way. By including them all under the same framework, the formalism can describe any agent that is trying to figure out what a human wants it to do. This allows us to see parallels between existing research, and it provides a framing that makes new avenues of research visible. The concept of informed preferences is introduced to deal with cases such as ”the teacher would like the learner to perform an action, but if it knew the consequences of that action, would prefer another action” or ”the teacher is very happy with the end result after the learner has cleaned the apartment, but if it knew that the cleaning produced a lot of noise that disturbed the neighbors, it would not like the cleaning strategy”. The success of a learner is judged