Robust Processing of Natural Language

Previous approaches to robustness in natural language processing usually treat deviant input by relaxing grammatical constraints whenever a successful analysis cannot be provided by ``normal'' means. This schema implies, that error detection always comes prior to error handling, a behaviour which hardly can compete with its human model, where many erroneous situations are treated without even noticing them. The paper analyses the necessary preconditions for achieving a higher degree of robustness in natural language processing and suggests a quite different approach based on a procedure for structural disambiguation. It not only offers the possibility to cope with robustness issues in a more natural way but eventually might be suited to accommodate quite different aspects of robust behaviour within a single framework.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, uses pstricks.sty, pstricks.tex, pstricks.pro, pst-node.sty, pst-node.tex, pst-node.pro. To appear in: Proc. KI-95, 19th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld (Germany), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer 199

Concurrent Lexicalized Dependency Parsing: The ParseTalk Model

A grammar model for concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing is introduced. Complete lexical distribution of grammatical knowledge is achieved building upon the head-oriented notions of valency and dependency, while inheritance mechanisms are used to capture lexical generalizations. The underlying concurrent computation model relies upon the actor paradigm. We consider message passing protocols for establishing dependency relations and ambiguity handling.Comment: 90kB, 7pages Postscrip

Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st

Ontology based Scene Creation for the Development of Automated Vehicles

The introduction of automated vehicles without permanent human supervision demands a functional system description, including functional system boundaries and a comprehensive safety analysis. These inputs to the technical development can be identified and analyzed by a scenario-based approach. Furthermore, to establish an economical test and release process, a large number of scenarios must be identified to obtain meaningful test results. Experts are doing well to identify scenarios that are difficult to handle or unlikely to happen. However, experts are unlikely to identify all scenarios possible based on the knowledge they have on hand. Expert knowledge modeled for computer aided processing may help for the purpose of providing a wide range of scenarios. This contribution reviews ontologies as knowledge-based systems in the field of automated vehicles, and proposes a generation of traffic scenes in natural language as a basis for a scenario creation.Comment: Accepted at the 2018 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 8 pages, 10 figure

Beyond Desartes and Newton: Recovering life and humanity

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws