{"pk":29709,"title":"Integrating semantics into developmental models of morphology learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A key challenge in language acquisition is learning morpho-logical transforms relating word roots to derived forms. Tra-ditional unsupervised algorithms find morphological patternsin sequences of phonemes, but struggle to distinguish validsegmentations from spurious ones because they ignore mean-ing. For example, a system that correctly discovers ”add /z/”as a valid morphological transform (song-songs, year-years)might incorrectly infer that ”add /ah.t/” is also valid (mark-market, spear-spirit). We propose that learners could avoidthese errors with a simple semantic assumption: morpholog-ical transforms approximately preserve meaning. We extendan algorithm from Chan and Yang (2008) by integrating prox-imity in vector-space word embeddings as a criterion for validtransforms. On a corpus of child-directed speech, we achieveboth higher accuracy and broader coverage than the purelyphonemic approach, even in more developmentally plausiblelearning paradigms. Finally, we consider a deeper semanticassumption that could guide the acquisition of more abstract,human-like morphological understanding.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Language Acquisition"},{"word":"morphology"},{"word":"development"},{"word":"semantics."}],"section":"Poster Session 1","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93c3f5gh","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Abigail","middle_name":"L.","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Mika","middle_name":"","last_name":"Braginsky","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Roger","middle_name":"P.","last_name":"Levy","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29709/galley/19566/download/"}]}