Computational Modeling of Human Language Acquisition

Afra Alishahi

Abstract: The nature and amount of information needed for learning a natural language, and the underlying mechanisms involved in this process, are the subject of much debate: is it possible to learn a language from usage data only, or some sort of innate knowledge and/or bias is needed to boost the process? This is a topic of interest to (psycho)linguists who study human language acquisition, as well as computational linguists who develop the knowledge sources necessary for largescale natural language processing systems. Children are a source of inspiration for any such study of language learnability. They learn language with ease, and their acquired knowledge of language is flexible and robust.