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# A Morphologically-Analyzed CHILDES Corpus of Hebrew

**Authors:** [Bracha Nir](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/bracha-nir/); [Brian MacWhinney](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/brian-macwhinney/); [Shuly Wintner](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/shuly-wintner/) · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Proceedings of LREC 2010 (Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L10-1112](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1112/) · library `lingbulk-2010-nir-morphologically-analyzed-childes-corpus-hebrew` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (ELRA, LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**6** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W1553423321) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/lingbulk-2010-nir-morphologically-analyzed-childes-corpus-hebrew/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L10-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1112/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1112.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af](https://doi.org/10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1553423321)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Bracha Nir](https://openalex.org/A5065495848) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8358-5483) · h 15 · 988 citations · 68 works
2. [Brian MacWhinney](https://openalex.org/A5043710796) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4988-1342) · h 83 · 33802 citations · 456 works
3. [Shuly Wintner](https://openalex.org/A5032082399) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7154-4764) · h 27 · 2368 citations · 164 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors bring the Hebrew child-language transcripts of CHILDES into a common form. Two longitudinal collections are used: the Berman corpus (four children, aged about 1;06 to 3;05) and the Ravid corpus (two siblings, from about 9 months to around 6 years). The corpus then had 110,819 utterances, 425,471 tokens and 19,224 types. The transcripts were uneven, so most of the child-directed speech (over 350,000 tokens) was semi-automatically re-transcribed into a Latin-letter phonemic scheme that encodes all vowels, stress and the consonant distinctions that the script loses. On this basis they built HebMor, a rule-based analyser: allophone rules, concatenation rules and lexicon files of over 7,000 entries. It analyses 95.4% of adult word tokens and 61% of child tokens. Of the analysed tokens, 29.4% of adult and 15.4% of child forms stay ambiguous. No accuracy evaluation is reported yet; the authors compare these coverage figures with the 93.8% that another analyser reports on written text.

## Ideas

- I1. Use the vowel-marked transcription as a controlled input for Mova's pointed mode. Run the same sentences pointed and unpointed through `tools/hbo`, and measure the drop. Use the corpus for measurement only, since its licence is NC.
- I2. Their verb rule is a finite-state pattern: a template with fixed vowels and an infix, applied to a consonantal root from the lexicon (their hitpael example, with the root g.b.r). Mova can check its Modern Hebrew verb paradigms against such a rule set, with the root lexicon as the only data.
- I3. Report coverage per token class, as they do: the share analysed and the share still ambiguous, separately for adult and child speech. Adopt the same two columns in any Mova Hebrew coverage report. Child speech with truncated forms is a stress test for the segmenter.

## For Mova

I1 goes into [3. Phonology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/03-phonology/) and the pointed-mode test of `tools/hbo`. I2 goes into [05b. Verb paradigms: the strong verb in seven binyanim and the weak roots](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms/). I3 is a reporting format for [11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/11-ud-analysis/) and `treebanks/he/`.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af](https://doi.org/10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af)

```
@inproceedings{nir2010morphologically,
  title = {{A Morphologically-Analyzed CHILDES Corpus of Hebrew}},
  author = {Nir, Bracha and MacWhinney, Brian and Wintner, Shuly},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2rhgx4p5t5af}
}
```

- [← previous Hebrew Dependency Parsing: Initial Results](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2009-goldberg-hebrew-dependency-parsing-initial-results/)
- [next → Machine Translation between Hebrew and Arabic: Needs, Challenges and Preliminary Solutions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2010-shilon-machine-translation-between-hebrew-arabic/)
- [↑ back to Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/)

## References

11 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Ruth A. Berman and Jürgen Weissenborn. 1991. Acquisition of word order: A crosslinguistic study. Final Report. German-Israel Foundation for Research and Development (GIF). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ruth+A%2E+Berman+and+Ju%CC%88rgen+Weissenborn%2E+1991%2E+Acquisition+of+word+order%3A+A+crosslinguistic+study%2E+Final+Report%2E+German%2DIsrael+Foundation+for+Research+and+Development+%28GIF%29%2E)
2. Ruth A. Berman. 1978. Modern Hebrew Structure. University Publishing Projects, Tel Aviv. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(79)90060-3)
3. Alon Itai and Shuly Wintner. 2008. Language resources for Hebrew. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42:75– 98, March. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9050-8)
4. Brian MacWhinney. 1996. The CHILDES system. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 5:5–14. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360.0501.05)
5. Brian MacWhinney. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, third edition. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Brian+MacWhinney%2E+2000%2E+The+CHILDES+Project%3A+Tools+for+Analyzing+Talk%2E+Lawrence+Erlbaum+Associates%2C+Mahwah%2C+NJ%2C+third+edition%2E)
6. Uzzi Ornan and Michael Katz. 1995. A new program for Hebrew index based on the Phonemic Script. Technical Report LCL 94-7, Laboratory for Computational Linguistics, Technion, Haifa, Israel, July. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Uzzi+Ornan+and+Michael+Katz%2E+1995%2E+A+new+program+for+Hebrew+index+based+on+the+Phonemic+Script%2E+Technical+Report+LCL+94%2D7%2C+Laboratory+for+Computational+Linguistics%2C+Technion%2C+Haifa%2C+Israel%2C+July%2E)
7. Uzzi Ornan. 1986. Phonemic script: A central vehicle for processing natural language – the case of Hebrew. Technical Report 88.181, IBM Research Center, Haifa, Israel. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Uzzi+Ornan%2E+1986%2E+Phonemic+script%3A+A+central+vehicle+for+processing+natural+language+%E2%80%93+the+case+of+Hebrew%2E+Technical+Report+88%2E181%2C+IBM+Research+Center%2C+Haifa%2C+Israel%2E)
8. Uzzi Ornan. 1994. Basic concepts in “Romanization” of scripts. Technical Report LCL 94-5, Laboratory for Computational Linguistics, Technion, Haifa, Israel, March. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Uzzi+Ornan%2E+1994%2E+Basic+concepts+in+%E2%80%9CRomanization%E2%80%9D+of+scripts%2E+Technical+Report+LCL+94%2D5%2C+Laboratory+for+Computational+Linguistics%2C+Technion%2C+Haifa%2C+Israel%2C+March%2E)
9. Kenji Sagae, Eric Davis, Alon Lavie, Brian MacWhinney, and Shuly Wintner. 2007. High-accuracy annotation and parsing of CHILDES transcripts. In Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, pages 25–32, Prague, Czech Republic, June. Association for Computational Linguistics. Kenji Sagae, Eric Davis, Alon Lavie, Brian MacWhinney, and Shuly Wintner. To Appear. Morphosyntactic annotation of CHILDES transcripts. Journal of Child Language. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kenji+Sagae%2C+Eric+Davis%2C+Alon+Lavie%2C+Brian+MacWhinney%2C+and+Shuly+Wintner%2E+2007%2E+High%2Daccuracy+annotation+and+parsing+of+CHILDES+transcripts%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+ACL%2D2007+Workshop+on+Cognitive+Aspect)
10. Shuly Wintner. 2004. Hebrew computational linguistics: Past and future. Artificial Intelligence Review, 21(2):113–138. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1023/b:aire.0000020865.73561.bc)
11. Shlomo Yona and Shuly Wintner. 2008. A finite-state morphological grammar of Hebrew. Natural Language Engineering, 14(2):173–190, April. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1017/s1351324906004384) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2005-yona-finite-state-morphological-grammar-hebrew/)