This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory -- the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT) -- has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is

Many theories have been proposed to explain difficulty with center embedded constructions, most attributing the problem to some kind of limited capacity short-term memory. However, these theories have developed for the most part independently of more traditional memory research, which has focused on uncovering general principles such as chunking and interference. This article attempts to gain some unification with this research by suggesting that an interesting range of core sentence processing phenomena can be explained as interference effects in a sharply limited syntactic working memory. These include difficult and acceptable embeddings, as well as certain limitations on ambiguity resolution, length effects in garden path structures, and the requirement for locality in syntactic structure. The theory takes the form of an architecture for parsing which can index no more than two constituents under the same syntactic relation. A limitation of two or three items shows up in a variety o...

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The Cognitive Dimensions framework outlined here is generalised broad-brush approach to usability evaluation for all types of information artifact, from programming languages through interactive systems to domestic devices. It also has promise of interfacing successfully with organisational and sociological analyses. Keywords Usability evaluation, cognitive dimensions, notations, telephone, Prolog, spreadsheet, cognitive psychology. 1. INTRODUCTION We are living through a technological revolution, in which much research is necessarily dominated by immediate aims and short-term goals, and most research papers report some new accomplishment. The accomplishment may be useful but generalisations from one creation to another are very weak, unless the second is a direct descendant from the first. This paper is a contrast. Science-based engineering rests on idealisations (capacitance, gravity). Physical or chemical theory describing these idealisations is combined with experience and cra...

The purpose of this book is to present a collection of papers that represents a broad spectrum of current research in learning methods for natural language processing, and to advance the state of the art in language learning and artificial intelligence. The book should bridge a gap between several areas that are usually discussed separately, including connectionist, statistical, and symbolic methods. In order to bring together new and different language learning approaches, we held a workshop at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Montreal in August 1995. Paper contributions were selected and revised after having been reviewed by at least twomembers of the international program committee as well as additional reviewers. This book contains the revised workshop papers and additional papers by members of the program committee. In particular this book focuses on current issues such as: -- How can we apply existing learning methods to language processing? -- What new learning methods are needed for language processing and why? -- What language knowledge should be learned and why?

Linguistic ambiguity is the greatest obstacle to achieving practical computational systems for natural language understanding. By contrast, people experience surprisingly little difficulty in interpreting ambiguous linguistic input. This dissertation explores distributed computational techniques for mimicking the human ability to resolve syntactic ambiguities efficiently and effectively. The competitive attachment theory of parsing formulates the processing of an ambiguity as a competition for activation within a hybrid connectionist network. Determining the grammaticality of an input relies on a new approach to distributed communication that integrates numeric and symbolic constraints on passing features through the parsing network. The method establishes syntactic relations both incrementally and efficiently, and underlies the ability of the model to establish long-distance syntactic relations using only local communication within a network. The competitive distribution of numeric ev...

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures.

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An extension to classicM unification, called graded unification is presented. It is capable of combining contradictory information. An interactive processing paradigm and parser based on this new operator are also presented.