I completed my MSc in the
Department of Computer Science at the University of
Toronto, working under
Yang Xu
in the
Computational Linguistics Group.
My MSc work focused on studying child language acquisition
in computational terms, with the aim of developing models
grounded in psychological theory to explain and predict
linguistic phenomena of early childhood. Concretely, I studied
children's linguistic creativity in the phenomenon known
as overextension.
Papers
- Ferreira Pinto, R., Jr., & Xu, Y. (2021). A computational theory of child overextension. Cognition. [pdf] [supplementary material] [GitHub]
- Xie, J. Y., Ferreira Pinto, R., Jr., Hirst, G., & Xu, Y. (2019). Text-based inference of moral sentiment change. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 4646-4655, Hong Kong, China. [pdf] [supplementary material] [GitHub]
- Ferreira Pinto, R., Jr., & Xu, Y. (2019). Children's overextension as communication by multimodal chaining. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]
MSc research paper: A Computational Theory of Children's Overextension. [pdf] [GitHub]