696 research outputs found
Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity
Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model
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Identity Avoidance in Turkish Partial Reduplication: Feature Specificity and Locality
This study investigates the Turkish partial reduplication phenomenon, in which the reduplicant is derived by prefixing C1VC2 syllable, where C1V are identical to the word-initial CV of the base and the C2 ends in one of the four linking consonants: -p, -m, -s, -r. This study re-examines the factors conditioning the choice of the linking consonant, by focusing the nature of the (dis)similarity (feature specificity) and the proximity (locality) between the consonants in the base and the linking consonant, using an acceptability rating task with over 200 participants and a diverse set of stimuli in terms of length and word shapes. Results indicate a gradient identity avoidance effect that extends over all consonants in the base. Crucially, the effect of all consonants is not uniform, with the strength of the effect decreasing further into the base. The study also uncovers an elusive interplay between the distance-based decay effect and the syllable position effect, both of which turn out to play a role in these non-categorical patterns with multiple features. Furthermore, results indicate that identity avoidance operates over both individual features as well as whole segments. Overall, the study argues that locality-sensitive feature-specific identity avoidance constraints are part of the grammar
A Challenge Set Approach to Evaluating Machine Translation
Neural machine translation represents an exciting leap forward in translation
quality. But what longstanding weaknesses does it resolve, and which remain? We
address these questions with a challenge set approach to translation evaluation
and error analysis. A challenge set consists of a small set of sentences, each
hand-designed to probe a system's capacity to bridge a particular structural
divergence between languages. To exemplify this approach, we present an
English-French challenge set, and use it to analyze phrase-based and neural
systems. The resulting analysis provides not only a more fine-grained picture
of the strengths of neural systems, but also insight into which linguistic
phenomena remain out of reach.Comment: EMNLP 2017. 28 pages, including appendix. Machine readable data
included in a separate file. This version corrects typos in the challenge se
A La Carte Embedding: Cheap but Effective Induction of Semantic Feature Vectors
Motivations like domain adaptation, transfer learning, and feature learning
have fueled interest in inducing embeddings for rare or unseen words, n-grams,
synsets, and other textual features. This paper introduces a la carte
embedding, a simple and general alternative to the usual word2vec-based
approaches for building such representations that is based upon recent
theoretical results for GloVe-like embeddings. Our method relies mainly on a
linear transformation that is efficiently learnable using pretrained word
vectors and linear regression. This transform is applicable on the fly in the
future when a new text feature or rare word is encountered, even if only a
single usage example is available. We introduce a new dataset showing how the a
la carte method requires fewer examples of words in context to learn
high-quality embeddings and we obtain state-of-the-art results on a nonce task
and some unsupervised document classification tasks.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, To appear in ACL 201
Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity
57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model.
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