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Parsing with parallelism : a spreading-activation model of inference processing during text understanding
The past decade of reseatch in Natural Language Processing has universally recognized that, since natural language input is almost always ambiguous with respect to its pragmatic implications, its syntactic parse, and even its lexical analysis (i.e., choice of correct word-sense for an ambiguous word), processing natural language input requires decisions about word meanings, syntactic structure, and pragmatic inferences. The lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic levels of inferencing are not as disparate as they have often been treated in both psychological and artificial intelligence research. In fact, these three levels of analysis interact to form a joint interpretation of text.ATLAST (A Three-level Language Analysis SysTem) is an implemented integration of human language understanding at the lexical, the syntactic, and the pragmatic levels. For psychological validity, ATLAST is based on results of experiments with human subjects. The ATLAST model uses a new architecture which was developed to incorporate three features: spreading activation memory, two-stage syntax, and parallel processing of syntax and semantics. It is also a new framework within which to interpret and tackle unsolved problems through implementation and experimentation
Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection
between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and
work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of
underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting
from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous
and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An
underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar
covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical
ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this
language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with
underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some
issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed.Comment: Latex, 47 pages. Uses tree-dvips.sty, lingmacros.sty, fullname.st
Secondary predication in Russian
The paper makes two contributions to semantic typology of secondary predicates. It provides an explanation of the fact that Russian has no resultative secondary predicates, relating this explanation to the interpretation of secondary predicates in English. And it relates depictive secondary predicates in Russian, which usually occur in the instrumental case, to other uses of the instrumental case in Russian, establishing here, too, a difference to English concerning the scope of the secondary predication phenomenon
Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Autonomy and Interaction in a Model of Sentence Processing
Is the human language understander a collection of modular processes
operating with relative autonomy, or is it a single integrated process? This
ongoing debate has polarized the language processing community, with two
fundamentally different types of model posited, and with each camp concluding
that the other is wrong. One camp puts forth a model with separate processors
and distinct knowledge sources to explain one body of data, and the other
proposes a model with a single processor and a homogeneous, monolithic
knowledge source to explain the other body of data. In this paper we argue that
a hybrid approach which combines a unified processor with separate knowledge
sources provides an explanation of both bodies of data, and we demonstrate the
feasibility of this approach with the computational model called COMPERE. We
believe that this approach brings the language processing community
significantly closer to offering human-like language processing systems.Comment: 7 pages, uses aaai.sty macr
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