Unsupervised Discovery of Phonological Categories through Supervised Learning of Morphological Rules

We describe a case study in the application of {\em symbolic machine learning} techniques for the discovery of linguistic rules and categories. A supervised rule induction algorithm is used to learn to predict the correct diminutive suffix given the phonological representation of Dutch nouns. The system produces rules which are comparable to rules proposed by linguists. Furthermore, in the process of learning this morphological task, the phonemes used are grouped into phonologically relevant categories. We discuss the relevance of our method for linguistics and language technology

MBT: A Memory-Based Part of Speech Tagger-Generator

We introduce a memory-based approach to part of speech tagging. Memory-based learning is a form of supervised learning based on similarity-based reasoning. The part of speech tag of a word in a particular context is extrapolated from the most similar cases held in memory. Supervised learning approaches are useful when a tagged corpus is available as an example of the desired output of the tagger. Based on such a corpus, the tagger-generator automatically builds a tagger which is able to tag new text the same way, diminishing development time for the construction of a tagger considerably. Memory-based tagging shares this advantage with other statistical or machine learning approaches. Additional advantages specific to a memory-based approach include (i) the relatively small tagged corpus size sufficient for training, (ii) incremental learning, (iii) explanation capabilities, (iv) flexible integration of information in case representations, (v) its non-parametric nature, (vi) reasonably good results on unknown words without morphological analysis, and (vii) fast learning and tagging. In this paper we show that a large-scale application of the memory-based approach is feasible: we obtain a tagging accuracy that is on a par with that of known statistical approaches, and with attractive space and time complexity properties when using {\em IGTree}, a tree-based formalism for indexing and searching huge case bases.} The use of IGTree has as additional advantage that optimal context size for disambiguation is dynamically computed.Comment: 14 pages, 2 Postscript figure

« ÇA N’A RIEN A VOIR NI AVEC MA VIE NI AVEC MON AVENIR, DONC POURQUOI CONTINUER ? » : EXPLORER LES RAISONS AUTO-DECLAREES DU PEU D’ENGOUEMENT DES ELEVES A SUIVRE LE FLS DANS LES ECOLES SECONDAIRES A LETHBRIDGE EN ALBERTA

En Alberta, les inscriptions aux cours de français langue seconde (FLS) dans les écoles secondaires révèlent qu’il y a peu d’intérêt parmi les élèves à apprendre le français. Bien qu’une frange importante des élèves du secondaire ait déjà rencontré la langue française à l’école primaire, la majorité ne poursuit pas l’apprentissage du FLS. À travers un questionnaire anonyme adressé aux élèves de 11e année d’une école secondaire à Lethbridge, cette étude examine les différentes raisons qui justifieraient ce faible intérêt. Peu d’élèves ont démontré une motivation intégrative et/ou instrumentale. Les données suggèrent aussi l’importance des rencontres culturelles avec la francophonie. En outre, il est possible que le FLS, tel qu’il est pratiqué, contienne en lui-même un défaut qui expliquerait, ne serait-ce qu’en partie, ce faible engouement. En tenant compte de tout cela, nous discutons dans cet article des approches possibles visant à encourager plus d’élèves à suivre les cours de FLS

Zelflerende systemen als instrument voor de taalkunde en de taaltechnologie

We introduceren zelflerende systemen als een operationalisering van pre-Chomskyaanse taaltheoretische concepten als analogie en inductie, en laten zien hoe ze kunnen worden toegepast in taalbeschrijving en (computer)taalkunde. Als casus bespreken we twee toepassingen: de automatische inductie van kennis over de beregeling van allomorfie bij Nederlandse diminutieven, en de rol van segmentele fonologische kennis bij de leerbaarheid van Nederlandse klemtoon

Prosodic modulation in the babble of cochlear implanted and normally hearing infants: a perceptual study using a visual analogue scale

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete information about prosodic modulation. In the present study, raters are asked to judge prominence since they simultaneously take into account all prosodic cues. Disyllabic utterances produced by CI and NH infants were presented to naive adult raters who had to indicate the degree and direction of prosodic modulation between syllables on a visual analogue scale. The results show that the babble of infants with CI is rated as having less prosodic modulation. Moreover, segmentally more variegated babble is rated as having more prosodic modulation. Raters do not perceive the babble to be predominantly trochaic, which indicates that the predominant stress pattern of Dutch is not yet apparent in the children’s productions