In this paper, we describe a multilingual open-source computational grammar of Persian, developed in Grammatical Framework (GF) – A type-theoretical grammar formalism. We discuss in detail the structure of different syntactic (i.e. noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectival phrases, etc.) categories of Persian. First, we show how to structure and construct these categories individually. Then we des...

Mandarin Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language, has distinct syntactic and morphological structures in comparison to IndoEuropean languages. This study concerns Chinese infants’ initial derivation of grammatical categories. We examined the prosodic properties of nouns and verbs of the maternal input speech. Non-word disyllabic noun-verb homophones were created and embedded in frequent carrier phrase...

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and ...

This paper describes the t rea tment of nominalizations in the PUNDIT text processing system. A single semantic definition is used for both nominalizations and the verbs to which they are related, with the same semantic roles, decompositions, and selectional restrictions on the semantic roles. However, because syntact ical ly nominalizations are noun phrases, the processing which produces the s...

We present a compositional distributional semantic model which is an implementation of the tensor-based framework of Coecke et al. (2011). It is an extended skipgram model (Mikolov et al., 2013) which we apply to adjective-noun combinations, learning nouns as vectors and adjectives as matrices. We also propose a novel measure of adjective similarity, and show that adjective matrix representatio...

A natural language parser that could extract noun phrases for all medical texts would be of great utility in analyzing content for information retrieval. We discuss the extraction of noun phrases from MEDLINE, using a general parser not tuned specifically for any medical domain. The noun phrase extractor is made up of three modules: tokenization; part-of-speech tagging; noun phrase identificati...

The present study examines noun-noun compounds where the internal noun is pluralized (e.g., new books shelf), contrary to normal constraints that prohibit such constructions. It is proposed that these apparent violations are licensed by a recursive mechanism where world formation passes into Syntax and back into Morphology. Thirty-six 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on their interpretations of co...

This paper studies the adjectival modification to nouns in Mandarin Chinese based on selective binding. The main findings include: (1)An adjective can select different types of head nouns as arguments and an adjective may modify an individual or an event. (2)The qualia structure of a noun helps us better understand an adjective’s selectional preference. Meanwhile, an adjective can modify multi-...