Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360
Competitive Dynamics in Language Understanding
Suzanne Stevenson
Department of Computer Science and Center for Cognitive Science
Rutgers University
Wednesday, May 20th, 1998
14.15 h
Room: D6-135
A computational theory of human parsing is presented that models the
sentence interpretation process as a competition for activation within
a hybrid connectionist network. The hybrid approach supports the
direct encoding of linguistic competence using simple symbolic
features, and the weighting of performance effects using spreading
activation. The competitive activation mechanism focuses the
activation within the network onto a particular structural
interpretation of the input, resolving syntactic ambiguities. The
approach accounts for a number of syntactic preference and reanalysis
behaviors, with no use of explicit preference heuristics or revision
strategies. Instead, the behaviors arise from independently motivated
aspects of the competitive activation mechanism.
Anke Weinberger, 1998-05-06