Towards an Automatic Measurement of Verbal Lexicon Acquisition: The Case for a Young Children-versus-Adults Classification in French and Mandarin

International audienceIn this paper we define a lexical metrology in graphs of verbal synonymy to com-pute the flexsemic score of speakers from their verbal productions in action denominationtasks. This flexsemic score is used to automatically categorize young children versus youngadults. We show that this score is effective in French and in Mandarin

Using Extra-Linguistic Material for Mandarin-French Verbal Constructions Comparison

International audienceSystematic cross-linguistic studies of verbs syntactic-semantic behaviors for ty-pologically distant languages such as Mandarin Chinese and French are difficult to conduct.Such studies are nevertheless necessary due to the crucial role that verbal constructions playin the mental lexicon. This paper addresses the problem by combining psycho-linguisticsand computational methods. Psycho-linguistics provides us with a bilingual corpus that fea-tures verbal construction associated with carefully built extra-linguistic material (short videoclips). Computational approaches bring us distributional semantic models (DSM) to measurethe distance between linguistic elements in the extra-linguistic space. These models allowsfor cross-linguistic measures that we evaluate against manually annotated data. In this pa-per, we discuss the results, potential shortcomings involving cultural variability and how tomeasure such bias

Using Extra-Linguistic Material for Mandarin-French Verbal Constructions Comparison

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Skillex, an action labelling efficiency score: the case for French and Mandarin

International audienceWe propose a model to compute two measurements of semantic efficiency of verbs as action labels. It is based on the exploration of the specific structure of synonymy networks of verbs. We use these measurements to analyse and compare the semantic efficiency of [Children/Adults] productions in action labelling tasks, in French and Mandarin. The combination of these two measurements leads to a generic score of semantic efficiency, Skillex. Assigned to participants of the Approx protocol experiment, this score enables us to accurately classify them into Children and Adults categories, be they French or Mandarin native speakers

Bridging the Gap between Graph Modeling and Developmental Psycholinguistics: An Experiment on Measuring Lexical Proximity in Chinese Semantic Space

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200