Machines that learn language more like kids do

Computer model could improve human-machine interaction, provide insight into how children learn language.

Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear. Among other things, this helps children establish their language’s word order, such as where subjects and verbs fall in a sentence.

In computing, learning language is the task of syntactic and semantic parsers. These systems are trained on…