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# Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech

**Authors:** [Ida Szubert](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ida-szubert/); [Omri Abend](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/omri-abend/); [Nathan Schneider](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nathan-schneider/); [Samuel Gibbon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/samuel-gibbon/); [Louis Mahon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/louis-mahon/); [Sharon Goldwater](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/sharon-goldwater/); [Mark Steedman](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/mark-steedman/) · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** arXiv:2109.10952 (manuscript, v2 2024) **Link:** [arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952) · library `langstream-2021-szubert-cross-linguistically-consistent-semantic-syntactic` · **Licence:** [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) (arXiv) — summary only, never carried into a release

[**2** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/langstream-2021-szubert-cross-linguistically-consistent-semantic-syntactic/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we readarXiv:2109.10952[licence](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952)
- [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.10952)
- [arXiv 2109.10952](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952)

**Authors (7)**

1. Ida Szubert
2. Omri Abend
3. Nathan Schneider
4. Samuel Gibbon
5. Louis Mahon
6. Sharon Goldwater
7. Mark Steedman

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper proposes a two-step method for annotating child-directed speech (CDS) in CHILDES. First, the utterances get Universal Dependencies (UD) trees, starting from the existing dependency annotation and then hand-corrected. Second, sentential logical forms (LFs) are produced from the UD trees by unlexicalised rules that look only at the tree and the POS tags, so the same rules work for any UD language. The authors build two corpora: about 17K English utterances (part of Brown's Adam corpus) and about 24K Hebrew utterances (the full Hagar corpus). The conversion gives an LF for 80.5% of English and 72.7% of Hebrew sentences, and a manual check finds 82% of sampled LFs fully correct in both languages. Inter-annotator agreement shows that UD can be applied reliably to CDS. A longitudinal study finds that English CDS changes little in construction frequency over time, while Hebrew changes more widely.

## Ideas

- I1. Write the UD-to-LF transduction as deterministic rules in `world`: an auxiliary or negation becomes a predicate over the matrix verb, and a shared subject or object across a coordinated verb pair is linked to both events. Measure coverage (share of sentences that yield an LF) and accuracy on a sampled set, and list the failure categories, as the paper does.
- I2. Use the paper's error categories as a test list for `prag` and `world`: underspecified relative clauses without a relative pronoun, coordination scope, and adpositional phrases in clauses. Each category becomes a small test with its gold LF.
- I3. Use a counts-only measure of dependency-type frequency over time (the paper's longitudinal check) on Mova's own English corpora, as a sanity check that the parser output keeps the same distributions across sub-corpora.

## For Mova

I1 goes into the English `world` crate (rules over UD trees) and is measured the way the paper measures it. I2 is a test set for `world` and `prag`. I3 is a corpus check that belongs in the `en` tooling. For Hebrew, the paper's note that the coordinating conjunction attaches to the following conjunct is a UD 2.0 convention worth recording in [Syntax: the clause and the sentence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/08-syntax/) as a comparison point; the Hagar transliteration is a reference for [2. Script and spelling](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/02-script-and-spelling/).

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [arXiv 2109.10952](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952)

```
@misc{szubert2021cross,
  title = {{Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech}},
  author = {Szubert, Ida and Abend, Omri and Schneider, Nathan and Gibbon, Samuel and Mahon, Louis and Goldwater, Sharon and Steedman, Mark},
  year = {2021},
  eprint = {2109.10952},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10952}
}
```

- [← previous AlephBERT: A Hebrew Large Pre-Trained Language Model to Start-off your Hebrew NLP Application With](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/langstream-2021-seker-alephbert-hebrew-large-pre-trained/)
- [next → Style transfer and classification in hebrew news items](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/langstream-2022-weingarten-style-transfer-classification-hebrew-news/)
- [↑ back to Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/)

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