CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions
Abstract:CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold-standard Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations, we train a state-of-the-art dependency parser specifically tailored to CHILDES. The parser more accurately captures syntactic patterns in child--adult interactions, outperforming widely used off-the-shelf English parsers, including SpaCy and Stanza. Alongside the parser, we also release a Part-of-Speech tagger and an utterance-level construction tagger, which together form the open-source Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child--Adult InTeractions (CAIT). Through a detailed error analysis and a case study tracking the distribution of syntactic constructions across developmental time in CHILDES, we demonstrate the practical utility of the toolkit for large-scale, reproducible research on language acquisition.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.19718 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.19718v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19718
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Francesca Padovani [view email][v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 11:53:08 UTC (1,046 KB)
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