creators_name: Marchal, Harmony creators_name: Lemaire, Benoit creators_name: Bianco, Maryse creators_name: Dessus, Philippe editors_name: Clark, Alex editors_name: Toutanova, Kristina type: confpaper datestamp: 2008-08-30 23:21:12 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:11 metadata_visibility: show title: A MDL-based Model of Gender Knowledge Acquisition ispublished: pub subjects: appl-cog-psy subjects: ling-comput full_text_status: public keywords: gender assignment,computational model,minimum description length 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. date: 2008 date_type: published publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics refereed: TRUE referencetext: Casalis, S., Louis-Alexandre, M.-F. (2000). Morphological analysis, phonological analysis and learning to read French. Reading and Writing, 12, 303-335. Chater, N. (1999). The search for simplicity: A fundamental cognitive principle? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 52A, 273-302. Chater, N., & Vitányi, P. (2003). Simplicity: a unifying principle in cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(1), 19-22. Chater, N., & Vitanyi, P. (2007) ‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 51(3), 35-163. Feldman, J. (2003). Perceptual Grouping by Selection of a Logically Minimal Model. International Journal of Computer Vision, 55(1), 5-25. Grünwald, P. (2005). Minimum description length tutorial. In P. D. Grünwald, I. J. Myung & M. Pitt (Eds.), Advances in MDL: Theory and Applications (pp. 23-80). Cambridge: MIT Press. Holmes, V.M., & Segui, J. (2004). Sublexical and lexical influences on gender assignment in French. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33(6), 425-457. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. Cambridge University Press. Lété, B., Sprenger-Charolles, L., & Colé, P. (2004). MANULEX: A grade-level lexical database from French elementary-school readers. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 156-166. Marchal, H., Bianco, M., Dessus, P. & Lemaire, B. (2007). The Development of Lexical Knowledge: Toward a Model of the Acquisition of Lexical Gender in French. Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Cognitive Science, 268-273. Matthews, C. A. (2005). French gender attribution on the basis of similarity: A comparison between AM and connectionist models. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 12(2-3), 262-296. Meunier, F., Seigneuric, A., Spinelli, E. (2008). The morpheme gender effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 88-99. Pfahringer, B. (1997). Compression-Based Pruning of Decision Lists, in Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Machine Learning, 199-212. Riegel, M., Pellat, J.C., & Rioul, R. (2005). Grammaire méthodique du français. Paris: PUF. Rissanen, J. (1978). Modeling by shortest data description. Automatica, 14, 465-471. Rivest, R.L. (1987). Learning Decision Lists. Machine Learning 2,3 (1987), 229-246. Skousen, R. (2003). Analogical Modeling: Exemplars, Rules, and Quantum Computing. Berkeley Linguistics Society citation: Marchal, Harmony and Lemaire, Benoit and Bianco, Maryse and Dessus, Philippe (2008) A MDL-based Model of Gender Knowledge Acquisition. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/6177/1/coNLL08.pdf