Section: New Results

Modelling word order preferences in French

Participants : Juliette Thuilier, Benoît Crabbé, Margaret Grant.

We study the problem of choice in the ordering of French words using statistical models along the lines of [60] and [61] . This work aims at describing and model preferences in syntax, bringing additional elements to Bresnan's thesis, according to which the syntactic competence of human beings can be largely simulated by probabilistic models. We previously investigated the relative position of attributive adjectives with respect to the noun.

This year has seen the Phd thesis defense of Juliette Thuilier in September 2012.

In collaboration with Anne Abeillé (Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris 7), we extended our corpora study with psycholinguistic questionnaires, in order to show that statistical models are reflecting some linguistic knowledge of French speakers. The preliminary results confirm that animacy is not a relevant factor in ordering French complements.

As regards to corpus work, we are extending the database with spontaneous speech corpora (CORAL-ROM and CORPAIX) and a wider variety of verbal lemmas, in order to enhance sample representativeness and statistical modelling. This activity has lead to the development of an extension of the French Treebank for oral corpora (approx 2000 sentences).

In a cross-linguistic perspective, we plan to strengthen the comparison with the constraints observed in other languages such as English or German with the recruitment of a new postdoc arriving at the beginning of 2013.

As can be seen from the outline above, this line of research brings us closer to cognitive sciences. We hope, in the very long run, that these investigations will bring new insights on the design of probabilistic parsers or generators. In NLP, the closest framework implementing construction grammars is Data Oriented Parsing (DOP).