The statistical-structural algorithm for unsupervised language acquisition, ADIOS (for Automatic DIstillation Of Structure), developed by Solan et al. (2005), has been shown capable of learning precise and productive grammars from realistic, raw and unannotated corpus data, including transcribed children-directed speech from the CHILDES corpora, in languages as diverse as English and Mandarin. ...

Abstract Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous on the development vocabulary by investigating features Sp...

In order to develop effective computerassisted language teaching systems for learners of English as a foreign language, it is first necessary to identify gaps between learners and native speakers in the four basic linguistic skills (reading, writing, pronunciation, and listening). To identify these gaps, the accuracy and fluency in language use between learners and native speakers should be com...

This paper describes the creation of a grammar to automatically detect agreement errors (gender and number) in Spanish texts written by Japanese learners. The grammar has been written using the Constraint Grammar formalism (Karlsson et al., 1995), and uses as input the morphosyntactic analysis provided by the Spanish parser HISPAL (Bick, 2006). For developing and testing the grammar, a learner ...

We present initial experimental results of an approach to learning ontological concepts from text. For each word to be learned, our system a) creates a corpus of sentences, derived from the web, containing this word; b) automatically semantically annotates the corpus using the OntoSem semantic analyzer; c) creates a candidate new concept by collating semantic information from annotated sentence...

We present a learning device able to deduce a set of Danish color and shape terms. Only two data sources are available to the learner: A phonetic transcription of a human informant solving a description task, and a minimal formal model of the picture being described. The system thus contains no preconceived lexical, morphological, or semantic categories. The test data are from the phonetic corp...

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for any distributional learning mechanism to operate e...

Annotating a corpus with error information is a challenging task. This paper describes the design, evaluation and refinement of an annotation scheme for Spanish article errors in learner data, so that future work on corpus annotation and automatic article error detection can progress. To evaluate reliability, 300 noun phrases with definite, indefinite and zero article have been tagged by four a...

This paper reports on the preliminary phase of our ongoing research towards developing an intelligent tutoring environment for Turkish grammar. One of the components of this environment is a corpus search tool which, among other aspects of the language, will be used to present the learner sample sentences along with their morphological analyses. Following a brief introduction to the Turkish lan...