Abstract
Language acquisition research has benefitted from the use of annotated corpora of child-directed speech to examine key questions about how children learn and process language in real-world contexts. However, a lack of sense-annotated corpora has limited investigations of child word sense disambiguation in naturalistic contexts. In this work, we sense-tagged 53 corpora of American and English speech directed to 958 target children up to 59 months of age, comprising a large-scale sample of 15,581 utterances for 12 ambiguous words. Importantly, we carefully selected target senses that we know - from previous investigations - young children understand. As such work was part of a project focused on investigating the role of verbs in child word sense disambiguation, we additionally coded for verb instances which took a target ambiguous word as verb object. We present experimental work where we leveraged our sense-tagged corpus ChiSense-12 to examine the role of verb-event structure in child word sense disambiguation, and we outline our plan to use Transformer-based computational architectures to test hypotheses on the role of different learning mechanisms underlying children word sense disambiguation performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.lrec-1.557
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5198–5205
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.557
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Francesco Cabiddu, Lewis Bott, Gary Jones, and Chiara Gambi. 2022. ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5198–5205, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus (Cabiddu et al., LREC 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.lrec-1.557.pdf
- Code
- francescocabiddu/chisense-12