CHILDES workshops?

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Luca,

  Sorry, we have not been very active of late in terms of organizing CHILDES
workshops, hoping instead that people will pick up use of the programs from
the manuals and other users.  Perhaps next year.  But, in the meantime, let
me suggest the best approach to your work with parts-of-speech.  If you want
to do this really thoroughly, you should learn to use the MOR program.  You
need to download the English MOR grammar, if you want to focus on English.
We also have a MOR grammar for Italian, by the way.  Unfortunately, we still
have only a modest amount of Italian data in the database.  Anyway, once you
have learned to use MOR and have run it on the corpora you are studying, you
then use COMBO with the +t%mor switch to track your various part-of-speech
patterns.  If you want to have a fully disambiguated %mor line, then you
also need to download the post.db database and run the POST disambiguator.
It works well, but for a totally new corpus, you can only expect about 90%
disambiguation accuracy without some further tweaking.

Good luck on this.  If you need the names of child language people in the UK
who know CHILDES, please tell me.

--Brian MacWhinney