Towards a Semantic-based Theory of Language Learning

Abstract

The notion of Structural Example has recently emerged in the domain of grammatical inference. It allows to solve the old difficult problem of learning a grammar grom positive examples but seems to be avery had hoc structure for this purpose. In this article, we first propose a formal version of the Principle of Compositionality based on Structural Examples. We then give a sufficient condition under which the Structural Examples used in grammatical inference can be inferred from sentences and their semantic representations, which are supposed to be naturally available in the environment of children learning their mother tongue. Structural Examples thus appear as an interesting intermediate representation between syntax and semantics. This leads us to a new formal model of language learniing where semantic information plays a crucial role.