Emergence of Syntax Needs Minimal Supervision

Raphaël Bailly, Kata Gábor


Abstract
This paper is a theoretical contribution to the debate on the learnability of syntax from a corpus without explicit syntax-specific guidance. Our approach originates in the observable structure of a corpus, which we use to define and isolate grammaticality (syntactic information) and meaning/pragmatics information. We describe the formal characteristics of an autonomous syntax and show that it becomes possible to search for syntax-based lexical categories with a simple optimization process, without any prior hypothesis on the form of the model.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
477–487
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.46
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.46
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raphaël Bailly and Kata Gábor. 2020. Emergence of Syntax Needs Minimal Supervision. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 477–487, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emergence of Syntax Needs Minimal Supervision (Bailly & Gábor, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.46.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929115