tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A Word-Order Database for Testing Computational Models of Language Acquisition"

An investment of effort over the last two years has begun to produce a wealth of data concerning computational psycholinguistic models of syntax acquisition. The data is generated by running simulations on a recently completed database of word order patterns from over 3,000 abstract languages. This article presents the design of the database which contains sentence patterns, grammars and derivations that can be used to test acquisition models from widely divergent paradigms. | A Word-Order Database for Testing Computational Models of Language Acquisition William Gregory Sakas Department of Computer Science PhD Programs in Linguistics and Computer Science Hunter College and The Graduate Center City University of New York sakas@ Abstract An investment of effort over the last two years has begun to produce a wealth of data concerning computational psycholinguistic models of syntax acquisition. The data is generated by running simulations on a recently completed database of word order patterns from over 3 000 abstract languages. This article presents the design of the database which contains sentence patterns grammars and derivations that can be used to test acquisition models from widely divergent paradigms. The domain is generated from grammars that are linguistically motivated by current syntactic theory and the sentence patterns have been validated as psychologically developmen-tally plausible by checking their frequency of occurrence in corpora of child-directed speech. A small case-study simulation is also presented. 1 Introduction The exact process by which a child acquires the grammar of his or her native language is one of the most beguiling open problems of cognitive science. There has been recent interest in computer simulation of the acquisition process and the interrelationship between such models and linguistic and psycholinguistic theory. The hope is that through computational study certain bounds can be established which may be brought to bear on pivotal issues in developmental psycholinguistics. Simulation research is a significant departure from standard learnability models that provide results through formal proof . Bertolo 2001 Gold 1967 Jain et al. 1999 Niyogi 1998 Niyogi Berwick 1996 Pinker 1979 Wexler Culi-cover 1980 among many others . Although research in learnability theory is valuable and ongoing there are several disadvantages to formal modeling of language acquisition Certain proofs may involve