@inproceedings{padovani-etal-2026-cait,
    title = "{CAIT}: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child{--}Adult {I}n{T}eractions",
    author = "Padovani, Francesca  and
      Yang, Xiulin  and
      Bunzeck, Bastian  and
      Jumelet, Jaap  and
      Matusevych, Yevgen  and
      Schneider, Nathan  and
      Bisazza, Arianna",
    editor = "Bonial, Claire  and
      Berzak, Yevgeni",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.conll-main.23/",
    pages = "395--420",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-410-1",
    abstract = "CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies{---}yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold-standard Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations, we train a state-of-the-art dependency parser specifically tailored to CHILDES. The parser more accurately captures syntactic patterns in child{--}adult interactions, outperforming widely used off-the-shelf English parsers, including SpaCy and Stanza. Alongside the parser, we also release a Part-of-Speech tagger and an utterance-level construction tagger, which together form the open-source Syntactic Annotation Toolkit for Child{--}Adult InTeractions (CAIT). Through a detailed error analysis and a case study tracking the distribution of syntactic constructions across developmental time in CHILDES, we demonstrate the practical utility of the toolkit for large-scale, reproducible research on language acquisition."
}