Human Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract

Suppose a young child is learning the names of animals. Dad occasionally points to an animal and says “dog!” But most of the time, the child just watches all sorts of animals by herself. Do such passive experiences help the child learn animals, in addition to the explicit instructions received from Dad? Intuitively, the answer appears to be “yes.” Perhaps surprisingly, there is little quantitative study on this question. Clearly, passive experiences are nothing more than unlabeled data, and it seems likely that humans exploit such information in ways similar to how semi-supervised learning algorithms in machines do. In this chapter, we demonstrate the potential value of semi-supervised learning on cognitive science.