Related papers: Unsupervised Language Acquisition: Theory and Prac…
Semi-supervised learning deals with the problem of how, if possible, to take advantage of a huge amount of unclassified data, to perform a classification in situations when, typically, there is little labeled data. Even though this is not…
Zero-resource word segmentation and clustering systems aim to tokenise speech into word-like units without access to text labels. Despite progress, the induced lexicons are still far from perfect. In an idealised setting with gold word…
Cross-lingual transfer of word embeddings aims to establish the semantic mappings among words in different languages by learning the transformation functions over the corresponding word embedding spaces. Successfully solving this problem…
Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes are corrected. Such learning from positive evidence has been viewed as raising logical…
Most positive and unlabeled data is subject to selection biases. The labeled examples can, for example, be selected from the positive set because they are easier to obtain or more obviously positive. This paper investigates how learning can…
Most existing algorithms for dictionary learning assume that all entries of the (high-dimensional) input data are fully observed. However, in several practical applications (such as hyper-spectral imaging or blood glucose monitoring), only…
The evolution of grammatical systems of syntactic and semantic composition is modeled here with a novel application of reinforcement learning theory. To test the functionalist thesis that speakers' expressive purposes shape their language,…
We present a new algorithm to model and investigate the learning process of a learner mastering a set of grammatical rules from an inconsistent source. The compelling interest of human language acquisition is that the learning succeeds in…
We show how to predict the basic word-order facts of a novel language given only a corpus of part-of-speech (POS) sequences. We predict how often direct objects follow their verbs, how often adjectives follow their nouns, and in general the…
Recent breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been driven by language models trained on a massive amount of plain text. While powerful, deriving supervision from textual resources is still an open question. For example,…
We propose an unsupervised method for detecting loanwords i.e., words borrowed from one language into another. While prior work has primarily relied on language-external information to identify loanwords, such approaches can introduce…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been widely researched with supervised approaches, while many low-resourced languages lack audio-text aligned data, and supervised methods cannot be applied on them. In this work, we propose a…
How do learners acquire knowledge of what is unacceptable without negative evidence? Construction Grammar proposes statistical preemption: exposure to a conventional form (e.g., "donated the books to the library") preempts structurally…
Speech recognition systems for irregularly-spelled languages like English normally require hand-written pronunciations. In this paper, we describe a system for automatically obtaining pronunciations of words for which pronunciations are not…
Recent advances in large language models using deep learning techniques have renewed interest on how languages can be learned from data. However, it is unclear whether or how these models represent grammatical information from the learned…
Grammatical inference consists in learning a language or a grammar from data. In this paper, we consider a number of models for inferring a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) with 3 sorts of states, that must accept some words, and…
Traditional natural language parsers are based on rewrite rule systems developed in an arduous, time-consuming manner by grammarians. A majority of the grammarian's efforts are devoted to the disambiguation process, first hypothesizing…
A statistical model for segmentation and word discovery in child directed speech is presented. An incremental unsupervised learning algorithm to infer word boundaries based on this model is described and results of empirical tests showing…
Word alignment is an important natural language processing task that indicates the correspondence between natural languages. Recently, unsupervised learning of log-linear models for word alignment has received considerable attention as it…
This thesis argues that the currently widely used Natural Language Processing algorithms possibly have various limitations related to the properties of the texts they handle and produce. With the wide adoption of these tools in rapid…