Through practical implementation of the components of a natural language interface to a virtual environment (VE), we investigate the requirements of such a system in terms of natural language understanding, spatial knowledge and reasoning, and human-computer interaction. In this project, we step through the process of creating a set of tools necessary for a natural language interface to a restr...

This paper reports the findings from an interconnected set of experiments designed to assess children’s knowledge of the semantic interactions between negation and quantified NPs. Our main finding is that young children, unlike adults, systematically interpret these elements on the basis of their position in overt syntax. We argue that this observation can be derived from an interplay between f...

Grammarware engineering, and grammar-dependent software development has received considerable attention in recent years. Despite of this fact, grammar refactoring as a significant cornerstone of grammarware engineering is still weakly understood and little practiced. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing universal algorithm for automated refactoring of context-free grammars called m...

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the causal relationship between Broca's area and lear...

Teacher language awareness and its relationship to pedagogical practice (Andrews, 2003) have been identified as significant contributors to the teaching of grammar. Various TESOL programs teach pedagogical and theoretical grammar in different ways and some focus on specific approaches to grammar teaching, which include systemic functional grammar, transformational grammar, traditional grammar a...

The Lucia comprehension system attempts to model human comprehension by using the Soar cognitive architecture, Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), and an incremental, word-by-word approach to grounded processing. Traditional approaches use techniques such as parallel paths and global optimization to resolve ambiguities. Here we describe how Lucia deals with lexical, grammatical, structural, an...

We present a relational learning framework for grammar induction that is able to learn meaning as well as syntax. We introduce a type of constraint-based grammar, lexicalized well-founded grammar (lwfg), and we prove that it can always be learned from a small set of semantically annotated examples, given a set of assumptions. The semantic representation chosen allows us to learn the constraints...

The development of Dialog-Based ComputerAssisted Language Learning (DB-CALL) systems requires research on the simulation of language learners. This paper presents a new method for generation of grammar errors, an important part of the language learner simulator. Realistic errors are generated via Markov Logic, which provides an effective way to merge a statistical approach with expert knowledge...

We present a phonological probabilistic contextfree grammar, which describes the word and syllable structure of German words. The grammar is trained on a large corpus by a simple supervised method, and evaluated on a syllabification task achieving 96.88% word accuracy on word tokens, and 90.33% on word types. We added rules for English phonemes to the grammar, and trained the enriched grammar o...

Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of ...