Practical text processing systems need wide covering grammars. When parsing unrestricted language, such grammars often fail to generate all of the sentences that humans would judge to be grammatical. This problem undermines successful parsing of the text and is known as undergeneration. There are two main ways of dealing with undergeneration: either by sentence correction, or by grammar correct...

What memory systems underlie grammar in children, and do these differ between typically developing (TD) children and children with specific language impairment (SLI)? Whilst there is substantial evidence linking certain memory deficits to the language problems in children with SLI, few studies have investigated multiple memory systems simultaneously, examining not only possible memory deficits ...

This paper introduces a set of English grammar symbols that the author has developed to enhance students’ understanding and consequently, application of the English grammar rules. A pretest-posttest control-group design was carried out in which the samples were students in two girls’ senior high schools (N=135, P ≤ 0.05) divided into two groups: the Treatment which received gramm...

We report on computational experiments in which a learning agent incrementally acquires grammar from a tutoring agent through situated embodied interactions. The learner is able to detect impasses in routine language processing, such as missing a grammatical construction to integrate a word in the rest of the sentence structure, to move to a meta-level to repair these impasses, primarily based ...

Phonological processes and structures are often limited to a particular set of a language’s words, such as loanwords, Latinate words in English, or Yamato words in Japanese. Typically, the etymologically older, or “core” set of words is more restricted in the structures that it permits, and is (hence) subject to more processes. To capture such restrictions in Optimality Theory, Itô and Mester (...

This paper evaluates two methods of learning constraint dependency grammars from corpora: one uses the sentences directly and the other uses subgrammar expanded sentences. Learning curves and test set parsing results show that grammars generated directly from sentences have a low degree of parse ambiguity but at a cost of a slow learning rate and less grammar generality. Augmenting these senten...

A grammar is a way of specifying how elements should be ordered. One sort of grammar is a finite state grammar, as illustrated in Figure 1. It contains a finite number of states, represented by circles, connected by arrows showing allowable transitions. A grammatical sequence or ‘string’ can be produced by entering the network and changing states until the network is exited. So, for example, ac...

We propose a new language learning model that learns a syntactic-semantic grammar from a small number of natural language strings annotated with their semantics, along with basic assumptions about natural language syntax. We show that the search space for grammar induction is a complete grammar lattice, which guarantees the uniqueness of the learned grammar.

This article discusses the use of a French computerized grammar checker as a learning and teaching resource. As is well known, foreign language grammar checkers can give unreliable, even farcical results, but that does not necessarily mean that they cannot be effectively used by foreign language teachers. After some discussion of the nature of foreign language grammar checkers, the article pres...