OF THESIS ENTITLED ‘NEUROPROTECTIVE EFFECT BY Z-LIGUSTILIDE EXTRACTED FROM RADIX ANGELICA SINENSIS FOR THE TREATMENT OF CEREBRAL ISCHEMIA ’ Submitted by JUNRONG DU For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy At the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in January 2006

A key challenge faced by children in vocabulary acquisition is learning which of the many possible meanings is appropriate for a word. The word generalization problem refers to how children associate a word such as dog with a meaning at the appropriate category level in the taxonomy of objects, such as Dalmatians, dogs, or animals. We present extensions to a cross-situational learner that enabl...

We present an analysis of parser performance on speech data, comparing word type and token frequency distributions with written data, and evaluating parse accuracy by length of input string. We find that parser performance tends to deteriorate with increasing length of string, more so for spoken than for written texts. We train an alternative parsing model with added speech data and demonstrate...