The potential of social media to give insight into the dynamic evolution of public conversations, and into their reactive and constitutive role in political activities, has to date been underdeveloped. While topic modeling can give static insight into the structure of a conversation, and keyword volume tracking can show how engagement with a…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in…

This lecture considers what reference and pedagogical grammars and grammar teaching materials for L2 learners should ideally include, based on corpus evidence from both native-speaker and learner corpora. I demonstrate how learner corpora can be used to track the emergence of grammatical features, from the elementary level to advanced, how…

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating…

Proposes the Vocabulary-Management Profile, a tool for discourse analysis. The number of new words introduced in a moving interval of text 35 words long is counted and a curve created by plotting the number of new words in a successive interval at the midpoint of the interval. Analyses of text by George Orwell and James Joyce are presented. (JL)

This paper illustrates the use of corpus-based analytical techniques to address a range of issues in applied linguistics. This approach provides large databases of naturally occurring discourse, enabling empirical analyses of the actual patterns of use in a language and, when coupled with automatic computational tools, enables analyses of a scope…

An experiment compared the tagging of two languages: Czech, a highly inflected language with a high degree of ambiguity, and English. For Czech, the corpus was one gathered in the 1970s at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; for English, it was the Wall Street Journal corpus. Results indicate 81.53 percent accuracy for Czech and 96.83 percent…

Compares the success of lexical statistics, content analysis, and function words in determining the true author of "The Federalist." The function word approach proved most successful in attributing the papers to James Madison. Lexical statistics contributed nothing, while content analytic measures resulted in some success. (MJP)