Cognitive research on language and computational analysis

Author: Yuan Yulin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-10-01
Features: This book is a collection of papers on cognitive research and computational analysis of language. The central theme is: attempting to study and computationally analyze the structural patterns of language and the psychological mechanisms of semantic comprehension from the perspective of cognitive science, in order to explore how linguistic research can provide appropriate methods and suitable rules for computers to understand natural language. Through the articles in this book, readers can gain an understanding of: the cognitiveist trends prevalent in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience; the fundamental concepts of cognitive linguistics and its various research approaches in syntax and semantics; methods and steps for the formal representation of linguistic knowledge and its computational analysis; the structural cues and rules and strategies required for computers to understand natural language; how to characterize the syntactic and semantic connections between different terms in a sentence using concepts such as valence of verbs and nouns and predicate implicature, and to establish a micro-mechanism for computational semantic understanding using default reasoning in non-monotonic logic within a distributed activation semantic memory model; how to analyze the classificatory issues of Chinese words using psychological prototype theory; and how to demonstrate the possibility of clustering words based on their similarity on a feature surface using the concept of family resemblance. The book also discusses that linguistic categories possess psychological reality and that both linguistic and biological information follow the principle of dual segmentation during encoding. This book is suitable for readers interested in modern linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.