A Computational Model of Early Argument Structure Acquisition

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions-associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model fo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: COGSCI
• Authors: Afra Alishahi, Suzanne Stevenson
• Keywords: Appropriate Learning Mechanisms, Challenging Open Questions, COGSCI 2008, Specific Usages