Recent Developments in the NL-Soar Garden Path Theory

Abstract

This report describes a theory of garden path phenomena that is emerging from work on NL-Soar, a computational model of language comprehension embedded within the Soar architecture. The theory is constrained by a corpus of two kinds of sentences: garden paths (GP), which reveal the limitations of human comprehension in dealing with local ambiguities, and non-garden-paths (NGP), which reveal its power in handling local ambiguities. NL-Soar in a single-path comprehender with a limited capacity to repair misanalyzed input. A space of repair mechanisms is explored by hand simulation on the corpus. The importance of phonology and plausible search control is established, leading to a theory up to 95% accurate (76% worst case) in predicting performance on 37 distinct GP and NGP types.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 21, 1992
Accession Number
ADA255889

Entities

People

  • Richard L. Lewis

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Ambiguity
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computer Science
  • Data Sets
  • Grammars
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Translation
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • New York
  • Phonology
  • Psychology
  • Simulations

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Military Science

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Spacecraft Maneuvers