A number of issues arise when trying to scaleup natural language understanding (NLU) tools designed for relatively simple domains (e.g., flight information) to domains such as medical advising or tutoring where deep understanding of user utterances is necessary. Because the subject matter is richer, the range of vocabulary and grammatical structures is larger meaning NLU tools are more likely t...

This paper discusses a developmental paradox, namely that children’s performance in language production sometimes exceeds their performance in language comprehension. This yields a puzzle for most theories of language acquisition. If a child produces a linguistic form correctly, this is considered to be evidence that the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge. However, if the child ...

We present an approach to automatic classification of adjectives in German with respect to a range functional categories. The approach makes use of the grammatical evidence that (i) the functional category of an adjectival modifier determines its relative ordering in an NP, and (ii) only modifiers that belong to the same category may appear together in a coordination. The coordination context a...

A genetic algorithm for inferring stochastic context-free grammars from nite language samples is described. Solutions to the inference problem are evolved by optimizing the parameters of a covering grammar for a given language sample. We describe a number of experiments in learning grammars for a range of formal languages. The results of these experiments are encouraging and compare very favour...

Sex/gender (S/G) differences in ASD language profiles have been poorly investigated. The present study aims to explore whether male (M) and female (F) children with normal non-verbal cognitive abilities differ their linguistic profiles. A sample of 76 Italian (range: 4.9–8 years), including 50 Ms 26 Fs, was retrospectively recruited. Language were analyzed using standardized tests for the evalu...