Articles

AbstractUnsupervised parsing is a difficult task that infants readily perform. Progress has been made on this task using text-based models, but few computational approaches have considered how infants might benefit from acoustic cues. This paper explores the hypothesis that word duration can help with learning syntax. We describe how duration …...

This paper presents yet another argument for the view that both the causative and in- choative verbs in the Japanese causative al- ternation are syntactically equally complex, derived independently from common bases. While morphological considerations alone suggest that such an approach must be taken to account for cases involving equipollent …...

Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora by Combining Contextual Repre- sentations Word’s context characterisation constitute the heart of most methods of bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora. In this article, we first revisit the two main strategies of context representation, that is : the window-based and the syntactic based context …...

Chunks and the notion of activation : a facilitation model for sentence processing We propose in this paper to integrate the notion of chunk within a global architecture for sentence processing. Chunks play an important role in cognitive theories such as ACT-R cite Anderson04 : they constitute global processing units …...

Treating ellipsis : two abstract categorial grammar perspectives The treatment of ellipsis in models of the syntax-semantics interface is troublesome as the linguistic material removed in the phonologic interpretation is still necessary in the semantics. Examples are particular cases of coordination, especially the ones involving verbal phrase ellipsis or subject …...

Linguistically motivated reordering meth- ods have been developed to improve word alignment especially for Statistical Ma- chine Translation (SMT) on long dis- tance language pairs. However, since they highly rely on the parsing accuracy, it is useful to explore the relationship between parsing and reordering. For Chinese-to- Japanese SMT, we …...

Extracting plausible transliterations from historical literature is a key issues in his- torical linguistics and other resaech fields. In Chinese historical literature, the charac- ters used to transliterate the same loanword may vary because of different translation eras or different Chinese language prefer- ences among translators. To assist historical linguiatics …...

Using Chinese characters as an intermedi- ate equivalent unit, we decompose machine translation into two stages, semantic transla- tion and grammar translation. This strategy is tentatively applied to machine translation between Vietnamese and Chinese. During the semantic translation, Vietnamese sylla- bles are one-by-one converted into the cor- responding Chinese characters. …...

In this paper, we present our effort in the de- velopment of a HPSG grammar for Chinese. We present the basic notions of the HPSG framework, review existing theoretical anal- yses and implementations of Chinese gram- mar fragments in HPSG and present a range of deep linguistic analyses that are …...

Formal properties of functions denoted by higher order anaphors like each other and syntactically complex expressions contain- ing each other are studied. A partial com- parison between these functions and func- tions denoted by (simple and complex) re- flexives is draw. In particular it is shown that both types of …...

In this paper, we present our recent experience in constructing a first-of-its-kind functional corpus based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Annotated on selected texts from the Penn Treebank, the corpus was built by a collaborative team on web-based annotation platform with several advanced features. After a discussion …...

Temporal information extraction can be split into the following three tasks: tem- poral expression extraction, time normalisa- tion, and temporal ordering relation resolu- tion. This paper describes a time expression and temporal ordering annotation schema for Japanese, employing the Balanced Cor- pus of Contemporary Written Japanese, or BCCWJ. The annotation …...

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students’ spoken English, which is one of the twenty sub- corpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al., 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the …...

A probabilistic segment model combining lexical cohesion and disruption for topic seg- mentation Identifying topical structure in any text-like data is a challenging task. Most existing techniques rely either on maximizing a measure of the lexical cohesion or on detecting lexical disruptions. A novel method combining the two criteria so …...

This study investigates age related differences in standardized tests scores of language usage and reading from elementary to high school for students who are either monolinguals whose L1 is English or bilinguals whose L1 is not English. An interactioneffect between grade level andreading and language usage standardized test scores was …...

This study explored Mandarin-speaking children’s ability in maintaining narrative coherence. Thirty Mandarin-speaking five- year-olds, 30 nine-year-olds and 30 adults participated. The narrative data were elicited using Frog, where are you? Narrative coherence was assessed in terms of causal networks. The results displayed children’s development in achieving narrative coherence by establishing …...

Given that Mandarin is a verb-serializing language, Russian a satellite-framed language, and Spanish a verb-framed language, the current study examines Mandarin college students’ acquisition of Russian and Spanish as L2, to understand the strength of L1 preferences for expression of PATH on Russian and Spanish majors’ second language acquisition in …...

Learner corpora are receiving special atten- tion as an invaluable source of educational feedback and are expected to improve teach- ing materials and methodology. However, they include various types of incorrect sen- tences. Error type classification is an impor- tant task in learner corpora which enables clarifying for learners why …...

The paper aims at the investigation of free word order. It concentrates on the rela- tionship between (formal) dependencies and word order. The investigation is performed by means of a semi-automatic application of a method of analysis by reduction to Czech syntactically annotated data. The paper also presents the analysis …...

Our internal repository of words, often known as the mental lexicon, has primarily been modelled by psychologists as some kind of network. One way to probe its organisation and access mechanisms is by means of word association techniques, which have rarely been applied on Chinese. This paper reports on the …...