2020/07/17 by Yuanyuan Zhao, Weiwei Sun, Zhao, Yuanyuan +3
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language and cultural evolution #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.09076
openalex publication_date 2020/07/17 · openalex created_date 2020/07/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is reasonable to hypothesize that the divergence patterns formulated by historical linguists and typologists reflect constraints on human languages, and are thus consistent with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in a certain way. In this paper, we validate this hypothesis on ten Indo-European languages. We formalize the delexicalized transfer as interpretable tree-to-string and tree-to-tree patterns which can be automatically induced from web data by applying neural syntactic parsing and grammar induction technologies. This allows us to quantitatively probe cross-linguistic transfer and extend inquiries of SLA. We extend existing works which utilize mixed features and support the agreement between delexicalized cross-linguistic transfer and the phylogenetic structure resulting from the historical-comparative paradigm.