A Morphologically-Analyzed CHILDES Corpus of Hebrew

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 and the pointed-mode test of tools/hbo. I2 goes into 05b. Verb paradigms: the strong verb in seven binyanim and the weak roots. I3 is a reporting format for 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies and treebanks/he/.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@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},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L10-1112/}
}

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
2. Ruth A. Berman. 1978. Modern Hebrew Structure. University Publishing Projects, Tel Aviv. find
3. Alon Itai and Shuly Wintner. 2008. Language resources for Hebrew. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42:75– 98, March. find
4. Brian MacWhinney. 1996. The CHILDES system. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 5:5–14. find
5. Brian MacWhinney. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, third edition. find
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
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
8. Uzzi Ornan. 1994. Basic concepts in “Romanization” of scripts. Technical Report LCL 94-5, Laboratory for Computational Linguistics, Technion, Haifa, Israel, March. find
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
10. Shuly Wintner. 2004. Hebrew computational linguistics: Past and future. Artificial Intelligence Review, 21(2):113–138. find
11. Shlomo Yona and Shuly Wintner. 2008. A finite-state morphological grammar of Hebrew. Natural Language Engineering, 14(2):173–190, April. find our card

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