Riassunto
We are still a long way from designing computers that can understand human languages. The authors view natural language as fundamental to human cognitive processes and perhaps the key to making machines that can understand us. In this electronic age, language is increasingly the province of workers in the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence who record, transmit, simulate and analyse its form and representation. The authors explore current thinking in the search for machine understanding of human languages, focusing on how computing machinery can acquire the cognitive structures which occur in natural language. The book begins with a summary of basic views of methodology, bringing together linguistic, scientific, neurological and related cognitive approaches. It concludes with a description of experimental learning mechanisms, some of which are simplifications of the way a natural language acquisition system might be built, and some example programs in PROLOG.
Contenuti
1 Art, Science and Engineering.- Cognitive Structures.- Scientific Method.- Language is Contrastive.- 2 Metaphor as a Cognitive Process.- Conjecture and Refutation, Theories and Hypotheses.- Specialization and Abstraction, Induction and Generalization.- Partial Analysis and Noise.- The Importance of Errors and Restrictions.- 3 Psychology and Psycholinguistics.- The Observable Processes of Acquisition.- External Influences: Parents, Imitation, and Correction.- Expansion and Reduction.- 4 Language Defects and Correction.- Rate and Order of Learning.- Telegraphic Speech.- Parents and Teachers: Good and Bad Examples.- Reinforcement: Punishment and Reward.- 5 Cognition and Restriction.- The Cognitive Processes of Language Acquisition.- The Magical Number Seven.- Memory and Capacity Phenomena.- Adult Characteristics.- 6 Nativism and Constructivism.- Representations: Deep Structure and Language Acquisition.- Acquisition Models, Chomsky and Piaget.- Computer Programs as Psychological Models.- 7 Neurology and Neurolinguistics.- Neuroanatomy: Brains, Neurons, and Synapses.- Neurophysiology and the Effects of Plasticity.- Neural Communication and Languages of the Brain.- Neural Nets: Connectionistic and Locationistic Models.- 8 The Nature of Language.- The Quintessence of Language.- Epistemology, Phonology, and Prosody.- Culture, Perspectives, and Metaphor.- 9 The Mechanics of Language.- Contrast and Similarity: Paradigmatic Learning and Context.- The Structures of Language.- Models of Grammar.- 10 The Ubiquity of the Sentence.- Pronouns and Anaphora.- Recursion of Syntax and Parsing.- Transformational Grammar.- Generative Grammar.- Learning Process and Idiolect.- 11 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.- Pattern Recognition, Problem Solving and Heuristic Search.- Learning Strategies.- Problems and Theoretical Limitations.- 12 Heuristics and Analytic Intransigence.- Automata and Formal Languages.- Methodologies: Implementation vs Experimentation.- Cybernetics and Robotics.- Deletionless Strategies.- Formalisms.- Clauses: Horn and non-Horn, unit and non-unit Systems: LUSH and PROLOG.- 13 Postulates, Claims and Hypotheses.- The Bases of Meaning and Learning.- The Organization of Concepts in Learning.- The Process of Learning.- The Artificial Subsumes the Natural.- 14 Computer Modelling Experiments.- Batteries One to Seven.- A Generalized Toy World Package.- Partial Analysis of NLA.- Future Systems.- Conclusions.
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