Bracha Nir

The Hebrew CHILDES corpus: transcription and morphological analysis

We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that reflects spoken interactions between children and adults. The corpus is an integral part of the CHILDES database, which distributes similar corpora for over 25 languages. We introduce a dedicated transcription scheme for the spoken Hebrew data that is sensitive to both the phonology and the standard orthography of the language. We also introduce a morphological analyzer that was specifically developed for this corpus. The analyzer adequately covers the entire corpus, producing detailed correct analyses for all tokens. Evaluation on a new corpus reveals high coverage as well. Finally, we describe a morphological disambiguation module that selects the correct analysis of each token in context. The result is a high-quality morphologically-annotated CHILDES corpus of Hebrew, along with a set of tools that can be applied to new corpora.

Computational evaluation of the Traceback Method.

Several models of language acquisition have emerged in recent years that rely on computational algorithms for simulation and evaluation. Computational models are formal and precise, and can thus provide mathematically well-motivated insights into the process of language acquisition. Such models are amenable to robust computational evaluation, using technology that was developed for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics. In this article we advocate the use of such technology for the evaluation of formal models of language acquisition. We focus on the Traceback Method, proposed in several recent studies as a model of early language acquisition, explaining some of the phenomena associated with childrens ability to generalize previously heard utterances and generate novel ones. We present a rigorous computational evaluation that reveals some flaws in the method, and suggest directions for improving it.

Formulations on Israeli political talk radio: From actions and sequences to stance via dialogic resonance

This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis (CA) and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection – a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of formulations account for many instances throughout the corpus, understanding this particular formulation in CA terms does not explain its drastic rejection by the caller. We therefore turn to an in-depth examination of strategies for lexical and syntactic resonance as a stance-taking device throughout the interaction. In so doing, we not only shed light on the anomalous interaction, but also offer an answer to a provocative question previously put forward by Haddington (2004) concerning which of the two – stances or actions – have more meaningful consequences for the description of the organization of interaction. In the particular interaction analyzed here, stances play the more significant role. We propose that the intersubjective stance-taking of participants may be viewed as a meta-action employed among participants as they move across actions, sequences, and activities in talk.

Parsing Hebrew CHILDES transcripts

We present a syntactic parser of (transcripts of) spoken Hebrew: a dependency parser of the Hebrew CHILDES database. CHILDES is a corpus of child–adult linguistic interactions. Its Hebrew section has recently been morphologically analyzed and disambiguated, paving the way for syntactic annotation. This paper describes a novel annotation scheme of dependency relations reflecting constructions of child and child-directed Hebrew utterances. A subset of the corpus was annotated with dependency relations according to this scheme, and was used to train two parsers (MaltParser and MEGRASP) with which the rest of the data were parsed. The adequacy of the annotation scheme to the CHILDES data is established through numerous evaluation scenarios. The paper also discusses different annotation approaches to several linguistic phenomena, as well as the contribution of morphological features to the accuracy of parsing.

Categories of Referential Content in Expository Discussions of Conflict

The paper presents a developmental analysis of expository text construction abilities of Hebrew-speaking school children, adolescents, and adults. Following the operationalized model of information categorization suggested for narrative texts (Berman 1997; Ravid and Berman 2006), the content of a particular sub-genre of expository discourse was characterized based on a taxonomy of content including Generalized Propositions, Descriptives, and Interpretives. The paper explores the distribution of these elements in naturalistic discourse, a data-base of 80 texts written by native Hebrew-speakers of four different age groups (4th, 7th, and 11th graders, compared with adults, see Berman and Verhoeven 2002). Results indicate that, across age-groups, writers construct expository discussions of the topic ‘Problems between People’ based mainly on descriptive information in the form of well-known or socially-shared facts that flesh out general claims. Moreover, with age, speakers tend to convey their stances and attitudes towards their generalized propositions. The study relates these results to the original, comparable analysis of personal-experience narrative texts sharing the same discourse topic that were produced by the same speaker-writers of Hebrew and considers the implications of both these analyses on a more general division into components of text content: a core, an anchor, and a supplement.