Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech
This work addresses the need for standardized resources in developmental linguistics and language acquisition research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation schemes and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of creating cross-linguistically consistent corpora of child-directed speech with semantic and syntactic annotations, resulting in two annotated corpora in English and Hebrew, covering about 80% of utterances in one corpus and all in another, with verified quality through inter-annotator agreement and manual evaluation.
This paper proposes a methodology for constructing such corpora of child directed speech (CDS) paired with sentential logical forms, and uses this method to create two such corpora, in English and Hebrew. The approach enforces a cross-linguistically consistent representation, building on recent advances in dependency representation and semantic parsing. Specifically, the approach involves two steps. First, we annotate the corpora using the Universal Dependencies (UD) scheme for syntactic annotation, which has been developed to apply consistently to a wide variety of domains and typologically diverse languages. Next, we further annotate these data by applying an automatic method for transducing sentential logical forms (LFs) from UD structures. The UD and LF representations have complementary strengths: UD structures are language-neutral and support consistent and reliable annotation by multiple annotators, whereas LFs are neutral as to their syntactic derivation and transparently encode semantic relations. Using this approach, we provide syntactic and semantic annotation for two corpora from CHILDES: Brown's Adam corpus (English; we annotate ~80% of its child-directed utterances), all child-directed utterances from Berman's Hagar corpus (Hebrew). We verify the quality of the UD annotation using an inter-annotator agreement study, and manually evaluate the transduced meaning representations. We then demonstrate the utility of the compiled corpora through (1) a longitudinal corpus study of the prevalence of different syntactic and semantic phenomena in the CDS, and (2) applying an existing computational model of language acquisition to the two corpora and briefly comparing the results across languages.