@inproceedings{padovani-etal-2026-cait,
title = "{CAIT}: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child{--}Adult {I}n{T}eractions",
author = "Padovani, Francesca and
Yang, Xiulin and
Bunzeck, Bastian and
Jumelet, Jaap and
Matusevych, Yevgen and
Schneider, Nathan and
Bisazza, Arianna",
editor = "Bonial, Claire and
Berzak, Yevgeni",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.23/",
pages = "395--420",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-410-1",
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 Annotation 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."
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<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 Annotation 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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions
%A Padovani, Francesca
%A Yang, Xiulin
%A Bunzeck, Bastian
%A Jumelet, Jaap
%A Matusevych, Yevgen
%A Schneider, Nathan
%A Bisazza, Arianna
%Y Bonial, Claire
%Y Berzak, Yevgeni
%S Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-410-1
%F padovani-etal-2026-cait
%X 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 Annotation 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.23/
%P 395-420
Markdown (Informal)
[CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions](https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.23/) (Padovani et al., CoNLL 2026)
ACL
- Francesca Padovani, Xiulin Yang, Bastian Bunzeck, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych, Nathan Schneider, and Arianna Bisazza. 2026. CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions. In Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 395–420, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.