Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13

Either directly or indirectly, the lexicon for a natural language specifies complementation frames or valences for open-class words such as verbs and nouns. Constructing a lexicon of complementation fram<:~s

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Statistical language learning research takes the view that many traditional natural language processing tasks can be solved by training probabilistic models of language on a sufficient volume of training data. The design of statistical language learners therefore involves answering two questions: (i) Which of the multitude of possible language models will most accurately reflect the properties necessary to a given task? (ii) What will constitute a sufficient volume of training data? Regarding the first question, though a variety of successful models have been discovered, the space of possible designs remains largely unexplored. Regarding the second, exploration of the design space has so far proceeded without an adequate answer. The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: it identifies a new class of designs by providing a novel theory of statistical natural language processing, and it presents the foundations for a predictive theory of data requirements to assist in future design explorations. The first of these contributions is called the meaning distributions theory. This theory

this paper. The language learning device clearly does impose constraints directly in a similar fashion --- there are certain types of language that the learner simply cannot acquire --- however these constraints are far less severe than those imposed by the LAD. As can be seen in the initial stages of the simulation, very un-language like systems can be acquired by this learner. The constraints on variation are not built into the learner, but are instead emergent properties of the social dynamics of learned communication systems and the structure of the semantic space that the individuals wish to express. The theory presented here gives us a neat explanation of why human languages use syntactic structure to compositionally derive semantics, have recursive subordination to express infinite distinctions in a digital way, have words with major syntactic categories such as noun and verb, and use structural relations (such as word order) to encode meaning distinctions. However, it does not seem to allow us to understand more specific universals. For example, why particular constituent orders are far more frequent than others across the languages of the world (Hawkins 1983; Dryer 1992). Perhaps the best explanation for these types of universal should look at the effect of parsing and generation in the transmission of replicators (see Kirby 1998a; Kirby 1997 for details). On the other hand, at least some of these word order constraints may eventually be explained in terms of linguistic adaptation without appealing to processing (see, Christiansen 1994; Christiansen & Devlin 1997 for some suggestions along these lines). X-bar theory --- a sub part of UG which constrains the structure of syntactic trees cross categorially (Jackendoff 1977) --- has been implicated in various word...

We present a language model consisting of a collection of costed bidirectional finite state automata associated with the head words of phrases. The model is suitable for incremental application of lexical associations in a dynamic programming search for optimal dependency tree derivations. We also

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This paper presents a new approach to the recognition of sentence structure by computer in human languages that have variable word order. In a sense, the algorithm is not new; there is good evidence that it was known 700 years ago (Covington 1984). But it has not been implemented on computers, and the modern implementations that are most like it fail to realize its crucial advantage for dealing with variable word order. 1 In fact, present-day parsing technology is so tied to the fixed word order of English that researchers in Germany and Japan customarily build parsers for English rather than their own languages. The new

This paper outlines a simple and general notion of syntactic category on a metatheoretical level, independent of the notations and substantive claims of any particular grammatical framework. We define a class of formal objects called "category structures" where each such object provides a constructive definition for a space of syntactic categories. A unification operation and subsumption and identity relations are defined for arbitrary syntactic categories. In addition, a formal language for the statement of constraints on categories is provided. By combining a category structure with a set of constraints, we show that one can define the category systems of several well-known grammatical frameworks: phrase structure grammar, tagmemics, augmented phrase structure grammar, relational grammar, transformational grammar, generalized phrase structure grammar, systemic grammar, categorial grammar, and indexed grammar. The problem' of checking a category for conformity to constraints is shown to be soivable in linear time. This work provides in effect a unitary class of data structures for the representation of syntactic categories in a range of diverse grammatical frameworks. Using such data structures should make it possible for various pseudo-issues in natural language processing research to be avoided. We conclude by examining the questions posed by set-valued features and sharing of values between distinct feature specifications, both of which fall outside the scope of the formal system developed in this paper

Current complex-feature based gnunrnars use a single procedureuficafionfor a multitude of put~ poses, among them, enforcing formal agreement between pcuely syntactic features. 32fis paper presents evidence from several natural languages that unification---variable-matching combined with variable substitutionis the wrong mechanism for effecting agreement. The view of grammar developed here is one in which unification is used for semantic interpretation, while purely formal agreement involves only a check for non-distinctnessi.e. variable-matching without variable substitution.