On the utility of curricula in unsupervised learning of probabilistic grammars (supplementary material

We examine the utility of a curriculum (a means of presenting training samples in a meaningful order) in unsupervised learning of probabilistic grammars. We introduce the incremental construction hypoth-esis that explains the benefits of a curriculum in learning grammars and offers some useful insights into the design of curricula as well as learning algo-rithms. We present results of experiments with (a) carefully crafted synthetic data that provide support for our hypothesis and (b) natural language corpus that demonstrate the utility of curricula in unsuper-vised learning of probabilistic grammars.