Programme booklet (pdf)

PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
The more the merrier? How data set size and noisiness
affect the accuracy of predicting the dative alternation
Abstract
Theijssen, Daphne and van Halteren, Hans and Boves, Lou and
Oostdijk, Nelleke
Radboud University Nijmegen
In the dative alternation in English, speakers and writers choose between the
prepositional dative construction ('I gave the ball to him' and the double object
construction ('I gave him the ball'). Logistic regression models have already been shown
to be able to predict over 90% of the choices correctly (e.g. Bresnan et al. 2007).
Collecting dative instances from a corpus and encoding them with the required
information is a costly procedure. We therefore developed a semi-automatic approach
to do this, consisting of three steps: (1) automatically extracting dative candidates, (2)
manually approving or rejecting these candidates, and (3) automatically annotating the
approved candidates with the required information. The resulting data sets are noisier
than data sets that have been checked completely manually, but the approach can
yield much larger data sets.
We compare the effect of data set size and noisiness on the accuracy of predicting the
dative alternation. We employ a 'manual' set of 2,877 instances in spoken English,
taken from Switchboard (Godfrey et al. 1992) by Bresnan et al (2007) and from ICE-GB
(Greenbaum 1996) by Theijssen (2010). In addition, we use a 'semi-automatic' set with
7,755 instances from Switchboard, ICE-GB and BNC (BNC Consortium 2007). We
compare the learning curves of various machine learning algorithms by randomly
selecting subsets of the data and extending them with 500 instances each time. We do
this for different levels of noisiness, i.e. varying the proportion of 'semi-automatic'
instances (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). The results are presented at the conference.
References
BNC Consortium (2007). The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition).
Oxford University Computing Services.
Bresnan Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina and R. Harald Baayen (2007). Predicting the
Dative Alternation. In Bouma, Gerlof, Irene Kraemer and Joost Zwarts (eds.), Cognitive
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