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Download fileAutomatic Measurement of Syntactic Development in Child Language
journal contribution
posted on 2005-06-01, 00:00 authored by Kenji Sagae, Alon Lavie, Brian MacwhinneyBrian MacwhinneyTo facilitate the use of syntactic information
in the study of child language
acquisition, a coding scheme for Grammatical
Relations (GRs) in transcripts of
parent-child dialogs has been proposed by
Sagae, MacWhinney and Lavie (2004).
We discuss the use of current NLP techniques
to produce the GRs in this annotation
scheme. By using a statistical
parser (Charniak, 2000) and memorybased
learning tools for classification
(Daelemans et al., 2004), we obtain high
precision and recall of several GRs. We
demonstrate the usefulness of this approach
by performing automatic measurements
of syntactic development with the
Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough,
1990) at similar levels to what child language
researchers compute manually.