Abstract
The process of acquiring language requires children to learn grammatical categories and apply these categories to new words. Researchers have proposed various explanations of this process in the form of algorithms and computational modeling. Recently, adaptation and selection models have been tested and applied as a possible explanation to the process of acquiring grammatical categories. These studies have proven promising, however, the external validity of this approach has not been examined by grammatically coding samples outside the training corpus. The current thesis applies an adaptation and selection model, which pauses the evolution of dictionaries after every thousand cycles to allow the tagging of 30 outside samples, which are then checked for tagging accuracy. The accuracy across the five training corpora by the six thousandth cycle averaged 76.75%. Additional research is needed to explore the effects of altering the parameters in the model.
Degree
MS
College and Department
David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders
Rights
http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Chatterton, Michelle, "External Validity of Grammatical Word Category Classification Using an Adaptation and Selection Model" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 5658.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5658
Date Submitted
2015-03-01
Document Type
Thesis
Handle
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd7611
Keywords
grammatical word categories, evolutionary programming, language acquisition
Language
english