Noun-Determiner diversity experiment

This is code that produces the results for the paper:

Silvey and Christodoulopoulos (2016), Children’s Production of Determiners as a Test Case for Innate Syntactic Categories, In Proceedings of Evolang 11

Requirements

• Java 1.7 or later
  • Check the version by running java -version:

    java version "1.8.0_65"
    Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_65-b17)
    Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.65-b01, mixed mode)
    

• Apache Maven

Installation

From the root directory run

mvn compile

Experiments

Real child-directed data (CHILDES)

The data files (in data/tagged) for Adam, Sarah, Eve, Naomi, Nina, Peter were downloaded from the CHILDES database (XML version).

They were cleaned using XMLCorpusCleaner and tagged using the Brill tagger.

To execute the replication experiment simply run:

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="determiners.YangReplicator"

Simulated Zipfian samples

To run the model on simulated Zipfian samples use:

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="determiners.Simulation"

This will produce two files:

• sim-average.csv: The mean predicted and empirical values for a range of noun types
• sim-raw@XX.csv: Raw numbers for a single simulation using XX noun types