La désambiguïsation des rattachements prépositionnels est une tâche syntaxique qui demande des connaissances sémantiques, pouvant être extraites d’une image associée au texte traité. Nous présentons et analysons les difficultés de cette tâche pour laquelle nous construisons un système complet entraîné sur une version étendue des annotations du corpus Flickr30k Entities. Lorsque la sémantique lexicale n’est pas disponible, l’information visuelle apporte 3 % d’amélioration.

This paper focuses on linguistic complexity from a relative perspective. It presents a grounded language learning system that can be used to study linguistic complexity from a developmental point of view and introduces a tool for generating a gold standard in order to evaluate the performance of the learning system. In general, researchers agree that it is more feasible to approach complexity from an objective or theory-oriented viewpoint than from a subjective or user-related point of view. Studies that have adopted a relative complexity approach have showed some preferences for L2 learners. In this paper, we try to show that computational models of the process of language acquisition may be an important tool to consider children and the process of first language acquisition as suitable candidates for evaluating the complexity of languages.

In this paper, we propose to use a subfield of machine learning –grammatical inference– to measure linguistic complexity from a developmental point of view. We focus on relative complexity by considering a child learner in the process of first language acquisition. The relevance of grammatical inference models for measuring linguistic complexity from a developmental point of view is based on the fact that algorithms proposed in this area can be considered computational models for studying first language acquisition. Even though it will be possible to use different techniques from the field of machine learning as computational models for dealing with linguistic complexity -since in any model we have algorithms that can learn from data-, we claim that grammatical inference models offer some advantages over other tools.