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@misc{cogprints6177, editor = {Alex Clark and Kristina Toutanova}, title = {A MDL-based Model of Gender Knowledge Acquisition}, author = {Harmony Marchal and Benoit Lemaire and Maryse Bianco and Philippe Dessus}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, year = {2008}, keywords = {gender assignment,computational model,minimum description length}, url = {http://cogprints.org/6177/}, abstract = {This paper presents an iterative model of knowledge acquisition of gender information associated with word endings in French. Gender knowledge is represented as a set of rules containing exceptions. Our model takes noun-gender pairs as input and constantly maintains a list of rules and exceptions which is both coherent with the input data and minimal with respect to a minimum description length criterion. This model was compared to human data at various ages and showed a good fit. We also compared the kind of rules discovered by the model with rules usually extracted by linguists and found interesting discrepancies.} }