Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
We met because we both share the same views of language. Language is a living organism, produced by neural mechanisms relating in large numbers as a society. Language exists between minds, as a way of communicating between them, not as an autonomous process. The logical 'rules' seem to us an epiphe nomena .of the neural mechanism, rather than an essential component in language. This view of language has been advocated by an increasing number of workers, as the view that language is simply a collection of logical rules has had less and less success. People like Yorick Wilks have been able to show in paper after paper that almost any rule which can be devised can be shown to have exceptions. The meaning does not lie in the rules. David Powers is a teacher of computer science. Christopher Turk, like many workers who have come into the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) was originally trained in literature. He moved into linguistics, and then into computational linguistics. In 1983 he took a sabbatical in Roger Shank's AI project in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. Like an earlier visitor to the project, John Searle from California, Christopher Turk was increasingly uneasy at the view of language which was used at Yale."
Synopsis
The authors explore current thinking in the search for machine understanding of human languages. The book begins with a summary of basic methodology and concludes with a description of experimental learning mechanisms and some example programs in PROLOG.