Center for Research in Cognitive Science

宾夕法尼亚大学提出了一项申请，申请建立一个研究认知科学的科学技术中心。该中心的主任将是Aravind K. Joshi教授。认知科学研究中心联合了来自许多传统学科（计算机科学、语言学、数学、哲学和心理学）的多样化和丰富的相互联系的小组。该研究的目标是了解人类获取环境知识、存储和检索这些知识、与他人交流并将其应用于实施行动和操纵环境的过程和机制。这项研究分为三个独立但高度相关的主题：感知和行动、语言学习和语言处理。感知和行动领域的研究涵盖了空间和光谱信息的视觉和听觉表征的第一阶段，到更复杂属性的高阶表征，再到生物体在目标导向行动中使用这些表征的存储和检索过程。语言学习研究的重点是儿童如何在视觉和听觉感知的基础上发展语言的抽象表征。语言处理的研究结合了对形式系统的研究和对计算模型的研究，所有这些都是在对各种自然语言进行实证研究的背景下进行的。感知和行动研究的显著特点是其对实际神经计算的逼真度越来越高，其复杂的计算建模以及对人工智能技术的贡献潜力。语言学习研究在机器学习和语言系统词汇和语法信息的自动获取方面具有巨大的技术衍生潜力，这对于开发足以对无约束文本进行稳健分析的语法至关重要。语言处理的研究将对人机交互的技术基础产生重大影响，特别是对数据库和专家系统以及一般的知识丰富系统的自然语言接口的设计。该中心将促进加强大学前教育和人力资源开发方面的活动。

ABSTRACT This proposal from the University of Pennsylvania requests funds to establish a Science Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science. The Director of the Center will be Professor Aravind K. Joshi. The Center for Research in Cognitive Science unites a diverse and richly interconnected group from many traditional disciplines (computer science, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology). The goal of the research is to understand the processes and mechanisms by which human beings acquire knowledge about their environment, store and retrieve that knowledge, communicate it to others, and apply it to carry out actions and manipulate their environment. The research is organized into three separate but highly interrelated themes: perception and action, language learning, and language processing. Research in the area of perception and action spans the processes involved in the first stages of visual and auditory representation of spatial and spectral information, to higher order representations of more complex attributes, to the storage and retrieval of such representations by the organism as they are used in goal-oriented actions. The study of language learning focuses on how children develop the abstract representations of language on the basis of their visual and auditory perceptions. The research in language processing combines investigation of formal systems with investigation of computational models, all in the context of empirical study of a wide range of natural languages. Significant features of the perception and action research are its increasing fidelity to actual neural computation and its sophisticated computational modeling and related potential for contributing to artificial intelligence technology. The language learning research has significant potential for technological spin-off in machine learning and automatic acquisition of lexical and grammatical information for language systems, crucial to the development of grammars sufficient for the robust analysis of unconstrained text. And the language processing research will have significant impact on the technological base for human- computer interaction, in particular the design of natural language interfaces for data base and expert systems and knowledge-rich systems in general. This Center will stimulate enhanced activity in precollege education and in the development of human resources.