Statistical learning methods offer a route for identifying linguistic constructions. Phrasal constructions are interesting both from the viewpoint of cognitive modeling and for improving NLP applications such as machine translation. In this article, an initial model structure and search algorithm for attempting to learn constructions from plain text is described. An information-theoretic optimi...

Abstract. The syntactic and semantic complexity of the so-called numeral classifier (Num-Cl) constructions in Korean challenges theoretical as well as computational linguists. We provide a constraint-based analysis of these constructions within the framework of HPSG with the semantic representations of MRS (Minimal Recursion Semantics) and reports its implementation in the LKB (Linguistic Knowl...

The United States and Iran as former allies turned into adversaries after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Since then the United States has tried to contain Iran as a state considered to be a threat to the U.S. national security. The U.S. Congress has also acted in line with the administrations’ policies and in some cases directed the administration to take a tougher stance toward Iran. A review...

We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children's utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitati...

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from ex...

This paper presents an argument against modularizing linguistic information in natural language generation systems. We argue that complex linguistic constructions require grammatical information to be located in the same module, in order to avoid over-complicating the system architecture. We demonstrate this point by showing how parenthetical constructions — which have only been generated in pr...

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a theoretical result showing that probabilistic learning in the limit is possible for a very general class of languages. We then describe a p...