An Architecture for Bootstrapping Lexical Semantics and Grammatical Structures

Abstract

Computational approaches to language acquisition typically reduce the problem to one of either learning syntax, or learning a lexicon -- isolated tasks. These problem simplifications have led to disconnected solutions and algorithms with no expectation of grounded inputs. We propose a language learning framework for bootstrapping the acquisition of a grammar and learning lexical semantics. We describe the framework and provide an instantiation using context-free grammars and a lambda-calculus semantic representation.