Machine Learning and the Cognitive Basis of Natural Language

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Language Learning and Language Universals

This paper explores the role of learning in generative grammar, highlighting interactions between distributional patterns in the environment and the innate structure of the language faculty. Reviewing three case studies, it is shown how learners use their language faculties to leverage the environment, making inferences from distributions to grammars that would not be licensed in the absence of a richly structured hypothesis space

A Preverbal Landing Site for Quantificational Operators

Al català [SpecJP] és una posició específicament dedicada a la codificació estructural explícita d'operadors quantificacionals. En aquesta posició s'hi troben els quantificadors existencials i universals preverbals i els elements QU a les preguntes QU. Les dades són les següents: (a) els elements QU a les preguntes QU (e.g. Campos (1986), Eguzkitza (1987)) i els quantificadors universals negatius preverbals (Laka (1991)) són adjacents a la seqüència verbal per l'esquena i es troben més avall de C i les dislocacions a l'esquerra; (b) els quantificadors [+operador] apareixen opcionalment en una posició preverbal que satisfà les mateixes característiques (Quer (1991)), i (c) un pic hom adopta la hipòtesi VOS (cf. Bonet (1990). Contreras (1991)) pel català, [Spec,IP], una posició adjacent a la seqüència verbal per l'esquerra i que és més avall de C i les dislocacions a l'esquerra, resta buida i disponible per a realitzar aquesta nova funció

Negation in Catalan : some Remarks with regard to no pas

En aquest treball es mira de contestar algunes preguntes que hom pot formular-se en l'estudi de les construccions negatives en català: (a) quants marcadors negatius cal distingir, (b) com cal descriure a la gramàtica nuclear d'aquesta llengua la diferència entre no i no pas, i (c) quina representació sintàctica s'hauria d'assignar a les estructures sintàctiques negatives. Es proposa que, a part de no, hi ha dos marcadors negatius: no pas 1, que és un nucli negatiu, i no pas 2, que és un especificador negatiu. Es mostra que aquests dos marcadors compostos que comparteixen el mateix contingut lògic, que correspon al d'un operador que té un domini de quantificació sobre un conjunt d'entitats conceptuals, de les quals s'escull un subdomini com a element contrastat negatiu. A l'última secció es donen arguments a favor de la hipòtesi que l'estructura sintàctica de les oracions negatives en català apunta a un SNeg que té SConc com a complement. El ST s'interpreta com a complement de Conc

Proceedings of the Workshop Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation (SCAR) 2007

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation, held in conjunction with NODALIDA 2007, on May 24 2007 in Tartu, Estonia.</p

A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference

This paper introduces the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MultiNLI) corpus, a dataset designed for use in the development and evaluation of machine learning models for sentence understanding. In addition to being one of the largest corpora available for the task of NLI, at 433k examples, this corpus improves upon available resources in its coverage: it offers data from ten distinct genres of written and spoken English--making it possible to evaluate systems on nearly the full complexity of the language--and it offers an explicit setting for the evaluation of cross-genre domain adaptation.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figures, 5 tables. v2 corrects a misreported accuracy number for the CBOW model in the 'matched' setting. v3 adds a discussion of the difficulty of the corpus to the analysis section. v4 is the version that was accepted to NAACL201

ON THE STRUCTURE AND ACQUISITION OF TELICITY AND UNACCUSATIVITY IN VIETNAMESE

In this paper, we investigate Chinese L2 learners' knowledge of two grammatical constraints in Vietnamese: the first, a constraint on the aspectual interpretation of accomplishment predicates, the second pertaining to alternations in the position of embedded subjects in mono-clausal lam causatives. Whereas the former constraint is shared by Vietnamese and Chinese, the two languages differ with respect to the latter. The results of three judgment tasks provide statistically reliable support for the idea that L2 interlanguage grammars are not ultimately limited by Ll patterns; given the absence of explicit teaching and only limited exposure to relevant structures, it is suggested that learners' performance may be guided by UG information

On the structure and interpretation of Polish passives

The realization of Polish passives is influenced by the specific properties that a given participle shares with its verbal base. These include: argument structure and aspectual type, the conjugation class and the phonological properties of the stem. This paper offers an account of how these variables are reflected in the exponence and morphophonology of Polish passives. The paper presents an analysis of the distribution of Passive Participle Markers -ł- /ɫ/, -t- /t/, -n- /n/ and -on- /ɔn/ in Polish within a syntactic approach to word formation (Jablonska 2004; Caha 2009, Embick &amp; Marantz 2008). I also address the issue of the morphophonological mutations attested in Polish passive participles and postulate that they should not be given a uniform analysis. The alternation between /ɛ/ and /a/ attested in Polish ej- and e-verbs is suppletive in nature, while mutations attested in the thematic marker -ną-~-nię- /nɔ̃/~/ɲɛ/̃ and the Passive Participle Marker -on-~-eni- /ɔn/~/ɛɲ/ are triggered by the integration of floating features into the structure of the said exponents

Linguistic Evidence Against Predicativism

The view that proper names are uniformly predicates (‘predicativism’) has recently gained prominence. I review linguistic evidence against it. Overall, the (cross-) linguistic evidence suggests that proper names function as predicates when they appear in a grammatically predicative position and as referential expressions when they are grammatically in a referential position. Conceptual grounds on which the predicativist view might nonetheless be upheld include ‘uniformity’, i.e., that a single semantic value be lexically specified for names in all of their occurrences irrespective of differences in their grammar. However, ‘being a predicate’ or ‘being referential’ are not lexical properties of words but indications for how these grammatically function on an occasion of their use. Moreover, the intuitively referential and intuitively predicative uses of proper names precisely covary with grammatical differences. A proper name is therefore a predicate when it is predicatively used, not when its grammar and meaning are different. Given this grammar-meaning alignment there is no motivation to posit a novel ‘covert syntax’ for names in their referential uses, which breaks this alignment. Cross-linguistic evidence from languages such as Catalan, which features overt determiners in referential uses of proper names, moreover turns out to strongly support the view that the grammar of human language is systematically sensitive to differences in the referential and predicative uses of name