Section: New Results

Modelling the acquisition of syntactic categories by children

Participant : Benoît Crabbé.

B. Crabbé co-supervised A. Gutman for an M2 thesis (MPRI) in collaboration with A. Christophe (LSCP/ENS) in the domain of psycholinguistic modelling. The topic was concerned with modelling and implementing psychologically motivated models of language treatment and acquisition. Contrary to classical Natural Language Processing applications, the main aim was not to create engineering solutions to language related tasks, but rather to test and develop psycholinguistic theories. In this context, the study was concerned with the question of learning word categories, such as the categories of Noun and Verb. It is established experimentally that 2-year-old children can identify novel nouns and verbs. It has been suggested that this can be done using distributional cues as well as prosodic cues. While the plain distributional hypothesis had been tested quite extensively, the importance of prosodic cues had not been addressed in a computational simulation. We provided a formulation for modelling this hypothesis using unsupervised and semi-supervised forms of bayesian learning (EM) both offline and online.