How do we know which grammatical error correction (GEC) system is best? A number of metrics have been proposed over the years, each motivated by weaknesses of previous metrics; however, the metrics themselves have not been compared to an empirical gold standard grounded in human judgments. We conducted the first human evaluation of GEC system outputs, and show that the rankings produced by metr...

In this paper, we show that local features computed from the derivations of tree substitution grammars — such as the identify of particular fragments, and a count of large and small fragments — are useful in binary grammatical classification tasks. Such features outperform n-gram features and various model scores by a wide margin. Although they fall short of the performance of the hand-crafted ...

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is a form of nondeclarative memory that involves the nonconscious acquisition of abstract rules. While data from amnesic patients indicate that AGL does not depend on the medial temporal lobe, the neural basis of this type of memory is unknown and was therefore examined using event-related fMRI. Prior to scanning, participants studied letter strings constructed...

The suitability of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm to capture relevant aspects of the acquisition of linguistic structures has been empirically tested in a number of EEG studies. Some have shown a syntax-related P600 component, but it has not been ruled out that the AGL P600 effect is a response to surface features (e.g., subsequence familiarity) rather than the underlying syntax...

Construction-based approaches to grammar are driven by the insight that meaning plays a crucial role in answering this question: the meanings of both words and grammatical structures can affect grammaticality, and they should therefore be incorporated into grammatical representations. To wit, the various approaches presented in this volume take this tack in predicting the grammaticality of utte...

This paper reports on the francophone corpus archive Corpus des variétés nationales du français (CoVaNa-FR) and the lexico-statistical platform Varitext. It outlines the design and data format of the samples as well as presenting various usage scenarios related to the applications featured by the platform’s toolbox.

We describe a formal framework for interpretation of words and compounds in a discourse context which integrates a symbolic lexicon/grammar, word-sense probabilities , and a pragmatic component. The approach is motivated by the need to handle productive word use. In this paper, we concentrate on compound nominals. We discuss the inadequacies of approaches which consider compound interpretation ...

1. INTRODUCTION. This paper investigates a small set of specific-general noun sequences (SGNs) and their role as a system of nominal classification in Sinhala. Systems of nominal classification have typically been described in terms of three sub-types: 1) lexical systems (class terms and measure terms), 2) lexico-grammatical systems (classifiers), and 3) grammatical systems (noun class markers ...

Questions about the nature of the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only recently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic investigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adop...