Center for Research in Cognitive Science

宾夕法尼亚大学的这项提案要求提供资金，以建立认知科学研究的科学技术中心。中心主任将由阿拉文德·K·乔希教授担任。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)的不同和相互关联的群体。这项研究的目标是了解人类获取关于其环境的知识的过程和机制，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他们的环境。这项研究分为三个独立但高度相关的主题：感知与行动、语言学习和语言处理。知觉和行动领域的研究涉及空间和光谱信息的视觉和听觉表征的第一阶段，到更复杂属性的更高阶表征，再到生物体在面向目标的行动中使用的这种表征的存储和检索。语言学习研究的重点是儿童如何在视觉和听觉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，所有这些都是在对广泛的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征是它对实际神经计算的保真度越来越高，其复杂的计算模型和相关的潜力有助于人工智能技术。语言学习研究在机器学习和自动获取语言系统的词汇和语法信息方面具有巨大的技术衍生潜力，这对于发展足以对不受限制的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，特别是数据库和专家系统以及一般知识丰富系统的自然语言接口的设计产生重大影响。该中心将促进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.