Is Word Segmentation Child's Play in All Languages?

Georgia R. Loukatou, Steven Moran, Damian Blasi, Sabine Stoll, Alejandrina Cristia
2019 Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics  
When learning language, infants need to break down the flow of input speech into minimal word-like units, a process best described as unsupervised bottom-up segmentation. Proposed strategies include several segmentation algorithms, but only cross-linguistically robust algorithms could be plausible candidates for human word learning, since infants have no initial knowledge of the ambient language. We report on the stability in performance of 11 conceptually diverse algorithms on a selection of 8
more » ... typologically distinct languages. The results are evidence that some segmentation algorithms are cross-linguistically valid, thus could be considered as potential strategies employed by all infants. Robert Daland. 2009. Word segmentation, word recognition, and word learning: A computational model of first language acquisition. . 2013. A joint learning model of word segmentation, lexical acquisition, and phonetic variability. In
doi:10.18653/v1/p19-1383 dblp:conf/acl/LoukatouMBSC19 fatcat:g7qkkm2qrrcu5lxbcymhsqskee