Guessing the Age of Acquisition of Italian Lemmas through Linear Regression

Irene Russo


Abstract
The age of acquisition of a word is a psycholinguistic variable concerning the age at which a word is typically learned. It correlates with other psycholinguistic variables such as familiarity, concreteness, and imageability. Existing datasets for multiple languages also include linguistic variables such as the length and the frequency of lemmas in different corpora. There are substantial sets of normative values for English, but for other languages, such as Italian, the coverage is scarce. In this paper,a set of regression experiments investigates whether it is possible to guess the age of acquisition of Italian lemmas that have not been previously rated by humans. An intrinsic evaluation is proposed, correlating estimated Italian lemmas’ AoA with English lemmas’ AoA. An extrinsic evaluation - using AoA values as features for the classification of literary excerpts labeled by age appropriateness - shows how es-sential is lexical coverage for this task.
Anthology ID:
2020.cmcl-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
CMCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
43–48
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cmcl-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.cmcl-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irene Russo. 2020. Guessing the Age of Acquisition of Italian Lemmas through Linear Regression. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 43–48, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Guessing the Age of Acquisition of Italian Lemmas through Linear Regression (Russo, CMCL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.cmcl-1.5.pdf
Data
Visual Genome