Category: construction grammar

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

April 11, 2019

[Read Full-Text] This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method for selecting the inventory of national varieties to include in the task; (ii) producing a large and dynamic set of … More Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

April 11, 2019

[Read Full-Text] A usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) posits that slot-constraints generalize from common exemplar constructions. But what is the best model of constraint generalization? This paper evaluates competing frequency-based and association-based models across eight languages using a metric derived from the Minimum Description Length paradigm. The experiments show that association-based models produce better generalizations across … More Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

Computational Learning of Construction Grammars

October 4, 2018

[Read Full-Tex: Computational Learning of Construction Grammars] [Original Data: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6oBPlj4dynZTFlXV1JNbF9GNEE%5D [Current code: https://github.com/jonathandunn/c2xg%5D This paper presents an algorithm for learning the construction grammar of a language from a large corpus. This grammar induction algorithm has two goals: first, to show that construction grammars are learnable without highly specified innate structure; second, to develop a model … More Computational Learning of Construction Grammars

Modeling the Complexity and Descriptive Adequacy of Construction Grammars

October 4, 2018

[Read Full-Text: Modeling construction grammars] [Code: https://github.com/jonathandunn/c2xg%5D This paper uses the Minimum Description Length paradigm to model the complexity of CxGs (operationalized as the encoding size of a grammar) alongside their descriptive adequacy (operationalized as the encoding size of a corpus given a grammar). These two quantities are combined to measure the quality of potential … More Modeling the Complexity and Descriptive Adequacy of Construction Grammars

Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectometry: A Corpus-Based Approach to Regional CxGs

October 4, 2018

[Read Full-Text: Finding variants for construction-based dialectometry] [Data: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xcnZ8uNGZTTWbaK_FYCbdtzTWPlxH7xQ%5D [Code: https://github.com/jonathandunn/c2xg%5D This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar of constructions (a CxG) using construction grammar induction and then … More Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectometry: A Corpus-Based Approach to Regional CxGs