A Tool for Language Learning Based on Categorial Grammars and Semantic Information
Daniela Dudau Sofronie6
, Isabelle Tellier6
and Marc Tommasi6 
| (6) |
LIFL-Grappa, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3, 59653 Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, France |
Abstract
Natural language learning still remains an open problem, although there exist many approaches issued by actual researches.
We also address ourselves this challenge and we provide here a prototype of a tool. First we need to clarify that we center
on the syntactic level. We intend to find a (set of) grammar(s) that recognizes new correct sentences (in the sense of the
correct order of the words) by means of some initial correct examples that are presented and of a strategy to deduce the corresponding
grammar(s) consistent(s) with the examples at each step. In this model, the grammars are the support of the languages, so,
the process of learning is a process of grammatical inference. Usually, in NLP approaches, natural language is represented
by lexicalized grammars because the power of the language consists in the information provided by the words and their combination
schemas. That’s why we adopt here the formal model of a categorial grammar that assigns every word a category and furnishes
some general combination schema of categories. But, in our model, the strings of words are not sufficient for the inference,
so additional information is needed. In Kanazawa’s work [3] the additional information is the internal structure of each sentence as a Structural Example. We try to provide instead
a more lexicalized information, of semantic nature: the semantic type of words. Its provenance, as well as the psycho-linguistic
motivation can be found in [1] and [2].
There exist different classes of categorial grammars depending on the set of combination schemas used: classical categorial
grammars, combinatory grammars, Lambek grammars.
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