Where Defaults Don't Help: the Case of the German Plural System
| dc.creator | Nakisa, Ramin Charles | |
| dc.creator | Hahn, Ulrike | |
| dc.date | 1996-05-13 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T09:10:17Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T09:10:17Z | |
| dc.description | The German plural system has become a focal point for conflicting theories of language, both linguistic and cognitive. We present simulation results with three simple classifiers - an ordinary nearest neighbour algorithm, Nosofsky's `Generalized Context Model' (GCM) and a standard, three-layer backprop network - predicting the plural class from a phonological representation of the singular in German. Though these are absolutely `minimal' models, in terms of architecture and input information, they nevertheless do remarkably well. The nearest neighbour predicts the correct plural class with an accuracy of 72% for a set of 24,640 nouns from the CELEX database. With a subset of 8,598 (non-compound) nouns, the nearest neighbour, the GCM and the network score 71.0%, 75.0% and 83.5%, respectively, on novel items. Furthermore, they outperform a hybrid, `pattern-associator + default rule', model, as proposed by Marcus et al. (1995), on this data set. | |
| dc.description | In proceedings of the 18th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 6 pages, 4 postscript figures. cmp-lg has trouble handling PS fonts under NFSS, so the postscript version is 6 pages in postscript Times Roman and the LaTeX source produces 7 pages of Computer Modern. Just add times to the \usepackage command if your system can handle it | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9605020 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9605020 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/151307 | |
| dc.subject | Computation and Language | |
| dc.title | Where Defaults Don't Help: the Case of the German Plural System | |
| dc.type | text |