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<Paper uid="W00-0743">
  <Title>The Acquisition of Word Order by a Computational Learning System</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In trying to solve the question of how to get a machine to automatically learn linguistic information from data, we can look at the way people do it. Gold (1967) when investigating language identification in the limit, obtained results that implied that natural languages could not be learned only on the basis of positive evidence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> These results were used as a confirmation for the proposal that children must have some innate knowledge about language, the Universal Grammar (UG), to help them overcome the problem of the poverty of the stimulus and acquire a grammar on the basis of positive evidence only. According to Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Theory (Chomsky 1981), the UG is composed of principles and parameters, and the process of learning a language is regarded as the setting of values of a number of parameters, given exposure to this particular language. We employ this idea in the learning framework implemented.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this work we are interested in investigating the acquisition of grammatical knowledge from data, focusing on the acquisition of word order, that reflects the underlying order in which constituents occur in different languages (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> SVO and SOV languages). The learning system is equipped with a UG and associated parameters, encoded as a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar, and a learning algorithm that fixes the values of the parameters to a particular language. The learning algorithm follows the Bayesian Incremental Parameter Setting (BIPS) algorithm (Briscoe 1999), and when setting the parameters it uses a Minimum Description Length (MDL) style bias to choose the most probable grammar that describes the data well, given the goal of converging to the target grammar. In section 2 we describe the components of the learning system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In section 3, we investigate the acquisition of word order within this framework and discuss the results obtained by different learners. Finally we present some conclusions and future work.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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