Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition

Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition
Author: Aline Villavicencio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642318630

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues The book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas involved, including computational models for language tasks, tools and resources that help to approximate the linguistic environment available to children during acquisition, and discussions of challenging aspects of language that children have to master. This is a much-needed collection that provides a cross-section of recent multidisciplinary research on the computational modeling of language acquisition. It is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding language acquisition. Readers of this book will be introduced to some of the latest approaches to these tasks including: * Models of acquisition of various types of linguistic information (from words to syntax and semantics) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition * Analysis of linguistic and contextual factors that influence acquisition * Resources and tools for investigating these tasks Each chapter is presented in a self-contained manner, providing a detailed description of the relevant aspects related to research on language acquisition, and includes illustrations and tables to complement these in-depth discussions. Though there are no formal prerequisites, some familiarity with the basic concepts of human and computational language acquisition is beneficial.

Multiword Expressions Acquisition

Multiword Expressions Acquisition
Author: Carlos Ramisch
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319092073

​This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications. The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

Working with Text

Working with Text
Author: Emma Tonkin
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2016-07-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1780634307

What is text mining, and how can it be used? What relevance do these methods have to everyday work in information science and the digital humanities? How does one develop competences in text mining? Working with Text provides a series of cross-disciplinary perspectives on text mining and its applications. As text mining raises legal and ethical issues, the legal background of text mining and the responsibilities of the engineer are discussed in this book. Chapters provide an introduction to the use of the popular GATE text mining package with data drawn from social media, the use of text mining to support semantic search, the development of an authority system to support content tagging, and recent techniques in automatic language evaluation. Focused studies describe text mining on historical texts, automated indexing using constrained vocabularies, and the use of natural language processing to explore the climate science literature. Interviews are included that offer a glimpse into the real-life experience of working within commercial and academic text mining. Introduces text analysis and text mining tools Provides a comprehensive overview of costs and benefits Introduces the topic, making it accessible to a general audience in a variety of fields, including examples from biology, chemistry, sociology, and criminology

Multiword expressions

Multiword expressions
Author: Manfred Sailer
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2018
Genre: Bilingualism
ISBN: 3961100632

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.

Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition

Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition
Author: Caroline F. Rowland
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261008

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.

Approaching Language Transfer through Text Classification

Approaching Language Transfer through Text Classification
Author: Scott Jarvis
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2012-03-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1847697003

Recent work has pointed to the need for a detection-based approach to transfer capable of discovering elusive crosslinguistic effects through the use of human judges and computer classifiers that can learn to predict learners’ language backgrounds based on their patterns of language use. This book addresses that need. It details the nature of the detection-based approach, discusses how this approach fits into the overall scope of transfer research, and discusses the few previous studies that have laid the groundwork for this approach. The core of the book consists of five empirical studies that use computer classifiers to detect the native-language affiliations of texts written by foreign language learners of English. The results highlight combinations of language features that are the most reliable predictors of learners’ language backgrounds.

Languages: From Formal to Natural

Languages: From Formal to Natural
Author: Orna Grumberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009-05-12
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3642017479

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Nissim Francez on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 15 papers, written by friends and colleagues, many of whom congregated at a celebratory symposium held on May 2009, in Haifa, Israel.