The purpose of this work is to investigate the process of grammatical acquisition from data. We are using a computational learning systern that is composed of a Universal Grammar with associated parameters, and a learning algorithm, following the Principles and Parameters Theory. The Universal Grammar is implemented as a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar, embedded in a default in...

Grammar extraction in deep formalisms has received remarkable attention in recent years. We recognise its value, but try to create a more precision-oriented grammar, by hand-crafting a core grammar, and learning lexical types and lexical items from a treebank. The study we performed focused on German, and we used the Tiger treebank as our resource. A completely hand-written grammar in the frame...

To facilitate the development of spoken dialog systems and speech enabled applications, we introduce SGStudio (Semantic Grammar Studio), a grammar authoring tool that enables regular software developers with little speech/linguistic background to rapidly create quality semantic grammars for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU). We focus on the underlying te...

SGStudio (Semantic Grammar Studio) is a grammar authoring tool that facilitates the development of spoken dialog systems and speech enabled applications. It enables regular software developers with little speech/linguistic background to rapidly create quality semantic grammars for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU). This paper introduces the framework of ...

Does tuning to one's native language explain the "sensitive period" for language learning? We explore the idea that tuning to (or becoming more selective for) the properties of one's native-language could result in being less open (or plastic) for tuning to the properties of a new language. To explore how this might lead to the sensitive period for grammar learning, we ask if tuning to an earli...

This research explores the effects of three computer-mediated feedback modalities, that is, elicitation, recast, and meta-linguistics, on the learning of English participial, gerund, and infinitival phrases among Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners. The overriding focus of the present study was to investigate whether different types of feedback given through form-focused computer-human exch...

This paper describes Grammar Learning by Partition Search, a general method for automatically constructing grammars for a range of parsing tasks. Given a base grammar, a training corpus, and a parsing task, Partition Search constructs an optimised probabilistic context-free grammar by searching a space of nonterminal set partitions, looking for a partition that maximises parsing performance and...

We investigated the hypothesis that two well-studied brain systems (see Feinberg & Farah, 1997) underlie the lexicon/grammar dichotomy (Ullman et al., 1997). In this view, frontal/basal-ganglia circuitry implicated in the learning and expression of motor and cognitive skills also underlie the acquisition and use of grammatical rules, and temporal-lobe circuits implicated in the learning and use...