Sequences from natural conversations, which are in ethnomethodological conversational analysis analyzed as "other-initiated self-repair", are here described as sequences in which participants manifest and treat local problems of understanding. This approach, which takes participants' perspectives into account, shows that these sequences have a detailed internal structure: - Participants use different types of problem manifestation to signal different types of problems of understanding; syntactic and prosodic cues are used as type-differentiating devices in problem manifestation; for different types of problems different assumptions with respect to the degree of reciprocity can be reconstructed as underlying problem manifestation and problem treatment. - There is a relation of conditional relevance holding between specific types of problem manifestation and specific types of problem treatment. - Problem types are ordered in relation to each other in terms of preference structures. Thus, an analysis which takes participants' perspectives into account and which looks more closely at linguistic signalling cues allows to differentiate between various types of internal structures within so-called repair sequences.

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.

Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child’s capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children’s recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.

In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh (cow) → /tu:/, or stopping, e.g., Schaf (sheep) → /ta:f/, which were inappropriate for their chronological age. The children were asked to produce words (picture naming task, word repetition task) with initial consonant clusters, in which the application of the error patterns would violate phonotactic sequence constraints. For instance, if fronting would apply in /kl-/, e.g., Kleid (dress), it would be realized as the phontactically illegal consonant cluster /tl-/. The results indicate that phonotactic constraints affect word production in children with delayed phonological developments. Surprisingly, we found that children with fronting produced the critical consonants correctly significantly more often in word-initial consonant clusters than in words in which they appeared as singleton onsets. In addition, the results provide evidence for a similar developmental trajectory of acquisition in children with typical development and in children with delayed phonological acquisition. Keywords: Children with delayed phonological acquisition, phonotactic constraints, word-initial consonant clusters, fronting, stopping.

We introduce and discuss a number of issues that arise in the process of building a finite-state morphological analyzer for Urdu, in particular issues with potential ambiguity and non-concatenative morphology. Our approach allows for an underlyingly similar treatment of both Urdu and Hindi via a cascade of finite-state transducers that transliterates the very different scripts into a common ASCII transcription system. As this transliteration system is based on the XFST tools that the Urdu/Hindi common morphological analyzer is also implemented in, no compatibility problems arise.

We present an algorithm that computes a function that assigns consecutive integers to trees recognized by a deterministic, acyclic, finite-state, bottom-up tree automaton. Such function is called minimal perfect hashing. It can be used to identify trees recognized by the automaton. Its value may be seen as an index in some other data structures. We also present an algorithm for inverted hashing.

This paper describes the key aspects of the system SynCoP (Syntactic Constraint Parser) developed at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The parser allows to combine syntactic tagging and chunking by means of constraint grammar using weighted finite state transducers (WFST). Chunks are interpreted as local dependency structures within syntactic tagging. The linguistic theories are formulated by criteria which are formalized by a semiring; these criteria allow structural preferences and gradual grammaticality. The parser is essentially a cascade of WFSTs. To find the most likely syntactic readings a best-path search is used.

This paper presents a system for the detection and correction of syntactic errors. It combines a robust morphosyntactic analyser and two groups of finite-state transducers specified using the Xerox Finite State Tool (xfst). One of the groups is used for the description of syntactic error patterns while the second one is used for the correction of the detected errors. The system has been tested on a corpus of real texts, containing both correct and incorrect sentences, with good results.

Temporal propositions are mapped to sets of strings that witness (in a precise sense) the propositions over discrete linear Kripke frames. The strings are collected into regular languages to ensure the decidability of entailments given by inclusions between languages. (Various notions of bounded entailment are shown to be expressible as language inclusions.) The languages unwind computations implicit in the logical (and temporal) connectives via a system of finite-state constraints adapted from finite-state morphology. Applications to Hybrid Logic and non-monotonic inertial reasoning are briefly considered.

In the last years, statistical machine translation has already demonstrated its usefulness within a wide variety of translation applications. In this line, phrase-based alignment models have become the reference to follow in order to build competitive systems. Finite state models are always an interesting framework because there are well-known efficient algorithms for their representation and manipulation. This document is a contribution to the evolution of finite state models towards a phrase-based approach. The inference of stochastic transducers that are based on bilingual phrases is carefully analysed from a finite state point of view. Indeed, the algorithmic phenomena that have to be taken into account in order to deal with such phrase-based finite state models when in decoding time are also in-depth detailed.