Computational Approaches to Language Acquisition

Computational Approaches to Language Acquisition
Author: Michael R. Brent
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1997
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780262522298

The past fifteen years have seen great changes in the field of language acquisition. New experimental methods have yielded insights into the linguistic knowledge of ever younger children, and interest has grown in the phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects of the lexicon. Computational investigations of language acquisition have also changed, reflecting, among other things, the profound shift in the field of natural language processing from hand-crafted grammars to grammars that are learned automatically from samples of naturally occurring language.Each of the four research papers in this book takes a novel formal approach to a particular problem in language acquisition. In the first paper, J. M. Siskind looks at developmentally inspired models of word learning. In the second, M. R. Brent and T. A. Cartwright look at how children could discover the sounds of words, given that word boundaries are not marked by any acoustic analog of the spaces between written words. In the third, P. Resnik measures the association between verbs and the semantic categories of their arguments that children likely use as clues to verb meanings. Finally, P. Niyogi and R. C. Berwick address the setting of syntactic parameters such as headedness--for example, whether the direct object comes before or after the verb.

Computational and Corpus Approaches to Chinese Language Learning

Computational and Corpus Approaches to Chinese Language Learning
Author: Xiaofei Lu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811335702

This book presents a collection of original research articles that showcase the state of the art of research in corpus and computational linguistic approaches to Chinese language teaching, learning and assessment. It offers a comprehensive set of corpus resources and natural language processing tools that are useful for teaching, learning and assessing Chinese as a second or foreign language; methods for implementing such resources and techniques in Chinese pedagogy and assessment; as well as research findings on the effectiveness of using such resources and techniques in various aspects of Chinese pedagogy and assessment.

Language, Cognition, and Computational Models

Language, Cognition, and Computational Models
Author: Thierry Poibeau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 110850678X

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.

Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition

Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition
Author: Jill de Villiers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-08-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9400716885

Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of syntactic topics that have formed the central domains of investigation and debate. These topics are treated from the unique perspective of central actors in each domain who have helped shape the research agenda. The authors have presented a summary of the data, the theories under discussion, and their own best assessments of where each domain stands. Providing as well the agenda for future work in the field showing both particular needs and general directions that should be pursued in the coming decades.

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax
Author: Brian Roark
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2007-08-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019153451X

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition
Author: Susan Foster-Cohen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2009-07-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 023024078X

This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Author: Dwight Atkinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136825797

This volume presents six alternative approaches to studying second language acquisition – 'alternative' in the sense that they contrast with and/or complement the cognitivism pervading the field. All six approaches – sociocultural, complexity theory, conversation-analytic, identity, language socialization, and sociocognitive – are described according to the same set of six headings, allowing for direct comparison across approaches. Each chapter is authored by leading advocates for the approach described: James Lantolf for the sociocultural approach; Diane Larsen-Freeman for the complexity theory approach; Gabriele Kasper and Johannes Wagner for the conversation-analytic approach; Bonny Norton and Carolyn McKinney for the identity approach; Patricia Duff and Steven Talmy for the language socialization approach and Dwight Atkinson for the sociocognitive approach. Introductory and commentary chapters round out this volume. The editor’s introduction describes the significance of alternative approaches to SLA studies given its strongly cognitivist orientation. Lourdes Ortega’s commentary considers the six approaches from an 'enlightened traditional' perspective on SLA studies – a viewpoint which is cognitivist in orientation but broad enough to give serious and balanced consideration to alternative approaches. This volume is essential reading in the field of second language acquisition.

The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing
Author: Alexander Clark
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2013-04-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1118448677

This comprehensive reference work provides an overview of the concepts, methodologies, and applications in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Features contributions by the top researchers in the field, reflecting the work that is driving the discipline forward Includes an introduction to the major theoretical issues in these fields, as well as the central engineering applications that the work has produced Presents the major developments in an accessible way, explaining the close connection between scientific understanding of the computational properties of natural language and the creation of effective language technologies Serves as an invaluable state-of-the-art reference source for computational linguists and software engineers developing NLP applications in industrial research and development labs of software companies

Computational Modeling of Human Language Acquisition

Computational Modeling of Human Language Acquisition
Author: Afra Alishahi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2022-06-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3031021401

Human language acquisition has been studied for centuries, but using computational modeling for such studies is a relatively recent trend. However, computational approaches to language learning have become increasingly popular, mainly due to advances in developing machine learning techniques, and the availability of vast collections of experimental data on child language learning and child-adult interaction. Many of the existing computational models attempt to study the complex task of learning a language under cognitive plausibility criteria (such as memory and processing limitations that humans face), and to explain the developmental stages observed in children. By simulating the process of child language learning, computational models can show us which linguistic representations are learnable from the input that children have access to, and which mechanisms yield the same patterns of behaviour that children exhibit during this process. In doing so, computational modeling provides insight into the plausible mechanisms involved in human language acquisition, and inspires the development of better language models and techniques. This book provides an overview of the main research questions in the field of human language acquisition. It reviews the most commonly used computational frameworks, methodologies and resources for modeling child language learning, and the evaluation techniques used for assessing these computational models. The book is aimed at cognitive scientists who want to become familiar with the available computational methods for investigating problems related to human language acquisition, as well as computational linguists who are interested in applying their skills to the study of child language acquisition. Different aspects of language learning are discussed in separate chapters, including the acquisition of the individual words, the general regularities which govern word and sentence form, and the associations between form and meaning. For each of these aspects, the challenges of the task are discussed and the relevant empirical findings on children are summarized. Furthermore, the existing computational models that attempt to simulate the task under study are reviewed, and a number of case studies are presented. Table of Contents: Overview / Computational Models of Language Learning / Learning Words / Putting Words Together / Form--Meaning Associations / Final Thoughts