The Analysis of Nominal Compounds,
Abstract
If one surveys the standard representational techniques for natural language that have evolved in linguistics and artificial intelligence. It is difficult to find much uniformity in the theories proposed. Distinctions are made between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, syntactic regularities and conceptual content, formal semantics and processes of common-sense inference, structural models and process models. An innocent bystander could easily come to the conclusion that the study of language is both ill-defined and lacking in systematic research methodologies. The whole business is rather reminiscent of the three blind men who conclude that an elephant is like a tree, a snake, or a wall: what you find depends a lot on where you poke around. The authors interest in language as a vehicle for communication. He is concerned with the conceptual content of sentences and the cognitive processes that extract conceptual content from a text or a discourse. These processes must be described in terms of human memory models and concerns for psychological validity or at least a healthy respect for psychological plausibility. He conducts my research by writing computer programs that simulate language processing behavior.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1985
- Accession Number
- ADA175068
Entities
People
- Wendy G. Lehnert
Organizations
- University of Massachusetts Amherst