Information retrieval studies that involve searching the Internet or marking phrases usually lack a well-defined number of negative cases. This prevents the use of traditional interrater reliability metrics like the kappa statistic to assess the quality of expert-generated gold standards. Such studies often quantify system performance as precision, recall, and F-measure, or as agreement. It can...

Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns (e.g. ribica ‘little fish’) than with their simplex counterparts (e.g. riba ‘fish’). This study explores factors responsible for the diminutive advantage, using a gender-agreement task with Serbian-speaking children (N=24, mean age 4;4). Over four sessions, children were introduced to picture...

Abstract Identifying factors that make certain languages harder to model than others is essential reach language equality in future Natural Language Processing technologies. Free-order case-marking languages, such as Russian, Latin, or Tamil, have proved more challenging fixed-order for the tasks of syntactic parsing and subject-verb agreement prediction. In this work, we investigate whether cl...

This paper investigates a recent change in the grammar of spoken Basque which results in the substitution of dative case and agreement for absolutive case and agreement in marking animate, specific direct objects. I argue that this pattern of use is due to convergence between the feature matrix of the functional category AGR in Spanish and Basque. In contrast to previous studies which point to ...

This paper examines how ordinary listeners, naïve with respect to the phonetics and phonology of prosody, perceive the location of prosodic boundaries that demarcate speech “chunks” and prominences that serve a “highlighting” function, in spontaneous speech (Buckeye corpus). Over 70 naïve listeners marked the locations of prominences and boundaries in a real-time transcription task. Fleiss’ mul...

The representation of agreement is a crucial aspect of current syntactic theory, and therefore should apply in both signed and spoken languages. Neidle et al. (2000) claim that all verb types in American Sign Language (agreeing, spatial, and plain) can occur with abstract syntactic agreement for subject and object. On this view, abstract agreement can be marked with either manual agreement morp...

The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE ...