Title:
A Theory of Interaction and Independence in Sentence Understanding
A Theory of Interaction and Independence in Sentence Understanding
Author(s)
Mahesh, Kavi
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Abstract
Developing a complete and well-specified computational
model of human language processing is a difficult problem.
Natural language understanding requires the application
of many different kinds of knowledge such as syntactic,
semantic, and conceptual knowledge. To account for the
variety of constructs possible in natural languages and
to explain the variety of human behavior in sentence
understanding, each kind of knowledge must be applicable
independently of others. However, in order to efficiently
resolve the many kinds of ambiguities that abound in
natural languages, the sentence processor must integrate
information available from different knowledge sources as
soon as it can. Such early commitment in ambiguity
resolution calls for an ability to recover from possible
errors in commitment.
In this work, we propose a unified-process, multiple
knowledge-source model of sentence understanding that
satisfies all the constraints above. In this
model, syntactic, semantic, and conceptual knowledge are
represented separately but in the same form. The single
unified process utilizes all knowledge sources to process
a sentence. The unified process can resolve structural
as well as lexical ambiguities and recover from errors
it might make. We show that this model can account
for a range of human sentence processing behaviors by
producing seemingly autonomous behavior at times and
interactive behaviors at other times. It is efficient
since it supports interaction between syntactic, semantic,
and conceptual processing. Moreover, the model aids
portability between domains by separating domain-specific
knowledge from general linguistic knowledge. We also
present an early commitment, expectation-driven, bottom-up
theory of syntactic processing that permits us to unify
syntactic processing with semantic processing. We show
several illustrative examples of ambiguity resolution and
error recovery processed by our prototype implementation
of the theory in a program called COMPERE (Cognitive Model
of Parsing and Error Recovery).
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Date Issued
1993
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498479 bytes
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report