Towards a Quatitative Corpus-based Evaluation Measure for Syntactic Theories
Franklin Chang, Elena Lieven, Michael Tomasello · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2005
It is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the match between syntactic theories and human utterance data.To address this problem, we propose an automatic evaluation measure based on a syntactic theory's ability to predict the order of words in actual utterances in corpora.To test this measure, a lexicalist theory of syntax acquisition is utilized and shown to achieve relatively high levels of prediction accuracy on both adult and child data from five typologically-different languages.Application of this evaluation measure to different input and output sets shows that this measure can address important linguistic criteria such as computational sufficiency, learnability, and typological-flexibility.