{"pk":31760,"title":"Distribuational Information and the Acquisition of Linguistic Categories: A Statistical Approach","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Distributional information, in the form of simple, lo-\ncally computed statistics of an input corpus, provi-\ndes a potential m e a n s of establishing initial syntac-\ntic categories (noun, verb, etc.). Finch and Chater\n(1991, 1992) clustered words hierarchically, accor-\nding to the distribution of locad contexts in which\nthey appeared in large, written English corpora,\nobtaining clusters that corresponded well with the\nstandard syntactic categories. Here, a stronger de-\nmonstration of their method is provided, using 'real'\ndata, that to which children are exposed during ca-\ntegory acquisition, taken from the childes corpus.\nFor 2-5 million words of aulult speech, clustering on\nsyntsu:tic and semantic bases was observed, with a\nhigh degree of cleai differentiation between syntac-\ntic categories. For child data, s o m e noun and verb\nclusters emerged, with s o m e evidence of other ca-\ntegories, but the data set was too small for reliable\ntrends to emerge. S o m e initial results investigating\nthe possibility of classifying novel words using only\nthe immediate context of a single instance are also\npresented. These results demonstrate that statisti-\ncal information m a y play an important role in the\nprocesses of early language 2u:quisition.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Submitted Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40k6382q","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Martin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Redington","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Nick","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chater","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Steve","middle_name":"","last_name":"Finch","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1993-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/31760/galley/22828/download/"}]}