Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mec...

We investigate the use of features expressing lexical generalizations over word forms when parsing web data and experiment with a range of web text samples, taken from the Ontonotes corpus, as well as the web 2.0 data sets described in Foster et al. (2011b). We obtain significant improvements for a standard data-driven dependency parser when incorporating features expressing these lexical categ...

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic mo...

While demonstratives and other determiner-like words in English are part of the functional system, their Japanese counterparts are simple lexical categories. The semantic theory (e.g. Brown & Fraser 1963) predicts that these elements must emerge at a later stage in both languages since they denote relatively abstract and complex meanings; whereas Radford's (1990) maturational theory makes no su...

Recent work in developmental psycholinguistics suggests that children may bootstrap grammatical categories and basic syntactic structure by exploiting distributional, phonological, and prosodic cues. Previous connectionist work has indicated that multiple-cue integration is computationally feasible for small artificial languages. In this paper, we present a series of simulations exploring the i...

Early perceptual processing capabilities are likely to contribute to the categorization of lexical vs. grammatical words by newborns. This lexical categorization could be performed by detecting differences in the prosodic structure of these word categories. Here we demonstrate that a Temporal Recurrent Network (TRN) that allows realistic treatment of the dynamic temporal aspect of prosody perfo...

It is shown that five apparently irreconcilable claims about the clausal syntax of Irish can be reconciled in a natural, base-generated LFG analysis that builds on the standard LFG theory of endocentricity and coheads/extended heads, the LFG projection architecture, and Toivonen’s (2001) work on nonprojecting categories and c-structure adjunction. The analysis also builds on McCloskey’s (1996) ...

Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisati...

This paper analyzes opinion categories like Sentiment and Arguing in meetings. We first annotate the categories manually. We then develop genre-specific lexicons using interesting function word combinations for detecting the opinions. We analyze relations between dialog structure information and opinion expression in context of multiparty discourse. Finally we show that classifiers using lexica...

We present an incremental Bayesian model for the unsupervised learning of syntactic categories from raw text. The model draws information from the distributional cues of words within an utterance, while explicitly bootstrapping its development on its own partiallylearned knowledge of syntactic categories. Testing our model on actual child-directed data, we demonstrate that it is robust to noise...