@article {liAssessingCapacityTransformer2023, title = {Assessing the Capacity of Transformer to Abstract Syntactic Representations: A Contrastive Analysis Based on Long-distance Agreement}, journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics}, volume = {10}, year = {2023}, author = {Li, Bingzhi and Wisniewski, Guillaume and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e}} } @article {7482, title = {Assessing the Capacity of Transformer to Abstract Syntactic Representations: A Contrastive Analysis Based on Long-distance Agreement}, journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics}, volume = {11}, year = {2023}, pages = {18-33}, doi = {10.1162/tacl_a_00531}, url = {https://hal.science/hal-03957265}, author = {Li, Bingzhi and Wisniewski, Guillaume and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e}} } @article {7399, title = {French word order : the role of animacy}, journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics}, volume = {6}, year = {2021}, pages = {1-55}, chapter = {1}, abstract = {

A major goal of the quantitative study of syntax has been to identify factors that have predictive power on speaker choices in the face of word-order or valence alternations (e.g. Arnold et al. 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan \& Ford 2010; Bader \& H\äussler 2010). In this paper, we study the role of animacy on the order of constituents in French. Animacy has been shown to affect sentence production in other languages, either directly (Feleki \& Branigan 1999; Kempen \& Harbusch 2004; Tanaka et al. 2011) or indirectly through grammatical role assignment (McDonald et al. 1993). Corpus studies however, have failed to find such an effect in French (Thuilier 2012a; Thuilier et al. 2014). Using a sentence recall task, we examined whether animacy has an impact on linear ordering or on grammatical function assignment. While we do find evidence for a role of animacy in the choice between active and passive voice, we do not find a preference to place animate arguments first with ditransitive verbs nor with nominal coordinations. While these findings tend to support the indirect hypothesis (McDonald et al. 1993; Kempen \& Harbusch 2004), we also find what may look like an anti-animacy effect: inanimate direct objects tend to precede animate indirect objects. We propose that canonical mappings between syntactic function and semantic role play a role in putting (inanimate theme) direct objects before (animate recipient) indirect objects, thus overriding the animacy first tendency in French.

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1155}, url = {https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5435/}, author = {Juliette Thuilier and Grant, Margaret and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Anne Abeill{\'e}} } @article {thuilierWordOrderFrench2021, title = {Word Order in {French: The Role of Animacy}, journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics}, volume = {6}, number = {1}, year = {2021}, month = {apr}, publisher = {Open Library of Humanities}, abstract = {A major goal of the quantitative study of syntax has been to identify factors that have predictive power on speaker choices in the face of word-order or valence alternations (e.g. Arnold et al. 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan \& Ford 2010; Bader \& H{\"a}ussler 2010). In this paper, we study the role of animacy on the order of constituents in French. Animacy has been shown to affect sentence production in other languages, either directly (Feleki \& Branigan 1999; Kempen \& Harbusch 2004; Tanaka et al. 2011) or indirectly through grammatical role assignment (McDonald et al. 1993). Corpus studies however, have failed to find such an effect in French (Thuilier 2012a; Thuilier et al. 2014). Using a sentence recall task, we examined whether animacy has an impact on linear ordering or on grammatical function assignment. While we do find evidence for a role of animacy in the choice between active and passive voice, we do not find a preference to place animate arguments first with ditransitive verbs nor with nominal coordinations. While these findings tend to support the indirect hypothesis (McDonald et al. 1993; Kempen \& Harbusch 2004), we also find what may look like an anti-animacy effect: inanimate direct objects tend to precede animate indirect objects. We propose that canonical mappings between syntactic function and semantic role play a role in putting (inanimate theme) direct objects before (animate recipient) indirect objects, thus overriding the animacy first tendency in French.}, author = {Juliette Thuilier and Grant, Margaret and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Anne Abeill{\'e}} } @article {simonenkoAgreementSyncretisationLoss2019, title = {Agreement Syncretisation and the Loss of Null Subjects : Quantificational Models for {Medieval French}, journal = {Language Variation and Change}, volume = {31}, number = {3}, year = {2019}, pages = {275{\textendash}301}, abstract = {This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}richness{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen{\textquoteright}s Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen{\textquoteright}s Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.}, author = {Simonenko, Alexandra and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Sophie Pr{\'e}vost} } @article {coavouxUnlexicalizedTransitionbasedDiscontinuous2019a, title = {Unlexicalized Transition-based Discontinuous Constituency Parsing}, journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics}, volume = {7}, year = {2019}, pages = {73{\textendash}89}, abstract = {

Lexicalized parsing models are based on the assumptions that (i) constituents are organized around a lexical head and (ii) bilexical statistics are crucial to solve ambiguities. In this paper, we introduce an unlexicalized transition-based parser for discontinuous constituency structures, based on a structure-label transition system and a bi-LSTM scoring system. We compare it with lexicalized parsing models in order to address the question of lexicalization in the context of discontinuous constituency parsing. Our experiments show that unlexicalized models systematically achieve higher results than lexicalized models, and provide additional empirical evidence that lexicalization is not necessary to achieve strong parsing results. Our best unlexicalized model sets a new state of the art on English and German discontinuous constituency treebanks. We further provide a per-phenomenon analysis of its errors on discontinuous constituents.

}, author = {Coavoux, Maximin and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Cohen, Shay B.} } @article {simonenkoTextFormGrammatical2018, title = {Text Form and Grammatical Changes in Medieval French : A Treebank-Based Diachronic Study}, journal = {Diachronica}, volume = {35}, number = {3}, year = {2018}, pages = {393{\textendash}428}, abstract = {

This paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By contrast, estimates based on an abstract grammar competition model which distinguishes between grammar-ambiguous surface forms (overt personal subjects, null subjects in coordination contexts) and grammar-unambiguous surface forms (overt expletive subjects, null subjects in non-coordination contexts) show prose-verse parallelism, prose having an earlier change onset, in line with traditional intuitions. At a more general level, these results suggest that the product of the interaction of a particular grammar with universal pragmatic laws is constant, which can be observed if the factors responsible for variation in grammatical choices are controlled for.

}, author = {Simonenko, Alexandra and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Sophie Pr{\'e}vost} } @article {5632, title = {Pr{\'e}diction structur{\'e}e pour l{\textquoteright}analyse syntaxique en constituants par transitions : mod{\`e}les denses et mod{\`e}les creux}, journal = {Traitement Automatique des Langues}, volume = {57}, year = {2016}, url = {https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01365252}, author = {Coavoux, Maximin and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e}} } @article {gutman:hal-01105141, title = {Bootstrapping the Syntactic Bootstrapper: Probabilistic Labeling of Prosodic Phrases}, journal = {{Language Acquisition}}, volume = {22}, number = {3}, year = {2015}, pages = {25}, publisher = {{Taylor \& Francis (Routledge)}}, doi = {10.1080/10489223.2014.971956}, url = {https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01105141}, author = {Gutman, Ariel and Dautriche, Isabelle and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Anne, Christophe} } @article {crabbe:hal-00768224, title = {XMG : eXtensible MetaGrammar}, journal = {Computational Linguistics}, volume = {39}, number = {3}, year = {2013}, month = {Sep}, pages = {591-629}, publisher = {{Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press)}}, keywords = {Grammar formalism}, url = {https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00768224}, author = {Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Denys Duchier and Gardent, Claire and Le Roux, Joseph and Parmentier, Yannick} } @article {thuilier:hal-00698896, title = {{Pr{\'e}dire la position de l{\textquoteright}adjectif {\'e}pith{\`e}te en fran{\c c}ais : approche quantitative}}, journal = {{Lingvisticae Investigationes}}, volume = {35}, number = {1}, year = {2012}, month = {Jun}, publisher = {{John Benjamins Publishing Company}}, url = {https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00698896}, author = {Juliette Thuilier and Fox, Gwendoline and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e}} }