1. Introduction Grammatical categories (e.g., noun, verb, and etc) are the building blocks of grammar, as grammars organize abstract linguistic categories rather than individual lexical items. Learning the categories of words is, thus, fundamental to the acquisition of language. Even theories in which learners are endowed with considerable innate linguistic knowledge allow that children need in...

In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical tones, whereas it precludes Dutch native speakers from reaching native level performance. Furthe...

In lexicalized grammatical formalisms, it is possible to separate lexical category assignment from the combinatory processes that make use of such categories, such as parsing and realization. We adapt techniques from supertagging — a relatively recent technique that performs complex lexical tagging before full parsing (Bangalore and Joshi, 1999; Clark, 2002) — for chart realization in OpenCCG, ...

In this paper, we discuss two graphs in Wikipedia (i) the article graph, and (ii) the category graph. We perform a graphtheoretic analysis of the category graph, and show that it is a scale-free, small world graph like other well-known lexical semantic networks. We substantiate our findings by transferring semantic relatedness algorithms defined on WordNet to the Wikipedia category graph. To as...

Children learn a robust representation of lexical categories at a young age. We propose an incremental model of this process which efficiently groups words into lexical categories based on their local context using an information-theoretic criterion. We train our model on a corpus of childdirected speech from CHILDES and show that the model learns a fine-grained set of intuitive word categories...

Currently, information architects create metadata category hierarchies manually. We present a nearly-automated approach for deriving such hierarchies, by converting the lexical hierarchy WordNet into a format that reflects the contents of a target information collection. We use the term “nearly-automated” because an information architect should have to make only small adjustments to produce an ...

This paper studies a tuned version of an induction tree which is used for automatic detection of lexical word category. The database used to train the tree has several fields to describe Spanish words morpho-syntactically. All the processing is performed using only the information of the word and its actual sentence. It will be shown here that this kind of induction is good enough to perform th...