LSLT: Yu'an Yang (LING)

Modeling children's acquisition of speech acts and clause types

This project investigates how children come to associate clause types with their canonical function, and in particular, interrogatives to questions. We examined speech acts and clause types in speech to children. I will first report some of the results from our corpus study, and then discuss our plans to model the learning process computationally, and how we are going to use Robustly-optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) to assist the annotation process.

If time permits, Yu'an will also practice her talk for the 5-Minute Linguist Competition, explaining her research for a more general audience:

Are you asking me or telling me? Learning to identify questions in early speech to children