@article{sahakian-snyder-2013-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Child Divergences from Adult Grammar",
    author = "Sahakian, Sam  and
      Snyder, Benjamin",
    editor = "Lin, Dekang  and
      Collins, Michael",
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "1",
    year = "2013",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/Q13-1011/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl_a_00215",
    pages = "125--138",
    abstract = "During the course of first language acquisition, children produce linguistic forms that do not conform to adult grammar. In this paper, we introduce a data set and approach for systematically modeling this child-adult grammar divergence. Our corpus consists of child sentences with corrected adult forms. We bridge the gap between these forms with a discriminatively reranked noisy channel model that translates child sentences into equivalent adult utterances. Our method outperforms MT and ESL baselines, reducing child error by 20{\%}. Our model allows us to chart specific aspects of grammar development in longitudinal studies of children, and investigate the hypothesis that children share a common developmental path in language acquisition."
}