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Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing

• Edited by Yorick Wilks

• Price: $79.95
• Binding: Hardback (also available in Paperback)
• Pages: 264
• Published by: Psychology Press
• Publication Date: 1st December 1989
• ISBN: 978-0-8058-0183-5

About the Book

Accompanying continued industrial production and sales of artificial intelligence and expert systems is the risk that difficult and resistant theoretical problems and issues will be ignored. The participants at the Third Tinlap Workshop, whose contributions are contained in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, remove that risk. They discuss and promote theoretical research on natural language processing, examinations of solutions to current problems, development of new theories, and representations of published literature on the subject. Discussions among these theoreticians in artificial intelligence, logic, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics draw a comprehensive, up-to-date picture of the natural language processing field.

Table of Contents

Contents: Y. Wilks, Introduction. Chapter 1:Words and World Representations. D. Walker, The World of Words. B. Boguraev, The Definitional Power of Words. B. Amsler, Words and Worlds. J. Hobbs, World Knowledge and Word Meaning. J. Kegl, The Boundary Between Word Knowledge and World Knowledge. Chapter 2:Unification and the New Grammatism. G. Gazdar, COMIT ==* PATR II. S. Pulman, Unification and the New Grammatism. A. Joshi, Unification and a Some New Grammatical Formalisms. Discussion. Chapter 3:Connectionist and Other Parallel Approaches to Natural Language Processing. D.L. Waltz, Connectionism: Not Just a Notational Variant, Not a Panacea. G. Cottrell, Toward Connectionist Semantics. E. Charniak, Connectionism and Explanation. J. McClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing and Role Assignment Constraints. W. Lehnert, Possible Implications of Connectionism. Discussion. Chapter 4:Discourse Theory and Speech Acts. C.R. Perrault, Towards a Semantic Theory of Discourse. R. Wilensky, Some Complexities of Goal Analysis. Chapter 5:Why Has Theoretical NLP Made So Little Progress? N.K. Sondheimer, The Rate of Progress in Natural Language Processing. L. BirnbaumLet's Put the AI Back in NLP. Chapter 6:Formal Versus Common Sense Semantics. D. Israel, On Formal Versus Commonsense Semantics. Y. Wilks, On Keeping Logic in its Place. K.S. Jones, They Say It's a New Sort of Engine: But the Sump's Still There. Discussion. Chapter 7:Reference: The Interaction of Language and the World. D. Appelt, Reference and Pragmatic Identification. D. Dahl, Determiners, Entities, and Contexts. A. Kronfeld, Goals of Referring Acts. B. Goodman, Reference and Reference Failures. Chapter 8:Metaphor. D. Gentner, B. Falkenhainer, J. Skorstad, Viewing Metaphor as Analogy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A. Ortony, L. Fainsilber, The Role of Metaphors in Descriptions of Emotions. E. Plantinga, Mental Models and Metaphor. Chapter 9:Natural Language Generation. A. Joshi, Generation: A New Frontier of Natural Language Processing? D.D. McDonald, No Better, But No Worse, Than People. D. Appelt, Bidirectional Grammars and the Design of Natural Language Generation Systems.