CompCog: The edge of the lexicon: Productive knowledge and direct experience in the acquisition and processing of multiword expressions

语言是人类思想最离散、最可测量的文化记录，在自然界中发现的交际系统中具有独特的表现力。每天我们都能理解几百个以前听过或读过但从未遇到过的句子，而且我们还会创造出更多的句子。然而，我们在这些沟通行为上的成功掩盖了这项任务的困难：语言充满了歧义，我们的注意力是有限的，我们的环境可能是嘈杂的，我们对与我们交往的人的共同知识和信仰的信息往往是不完整的。这种人类独有的能力，对我们对人类思维能力的科学理解提出了深刻的挑战。加深我们对这些能力的理解需要结合语言学、心理学和计算机科学的思想和方法。这一领域的进展有助于为自然语言技术的改进奠定基础，如文档摘要、意译、问答和机器翻译，以及更好地识别、诊断和治疗语言障碍。在这个更广泛的研究项目中，该项目侧重于“词汇的边缘”，阐明语言表达开始在使用它的母语人士的头脑中存储的条件，以及表达作为一个整体单元存储的后果。以英语为母语的人既知道允许和允许解释他们以前从未遇到过的短语和句子的生成规则，也知道可以通过这些生成规则组合起来的丰富词汇清单。这些词汇项目中有许多是单独的单词，但有证据表明，特定的、频繁的多词表达，如“肉和土豆”或“大多数”也可能存储在词典中。本项目结合基于人工智能的计算模型、大型语言数据集和受控心理实验来探索词汇的边缘，探索特定多词表达的直接经验如何导致它们存储在一个人的心理词汇中，这种存储如何与语言理解和生产中的生产性知识相协调，以及这些表达如何随着时间的推移而出现和变化。

Language is the most discrete, measurable cultural record of the human mind, and is uniquely expressive among the communicative systems found in nature. Every day we comprehend hundreds of sentences that we hear or read but have never encountered before, and we produce hundreds more. Yet our success at these many acts of communication belies the difficulty of the task: language is rife with ambiguity, our attention is limited, our environments may be noisy, and we often have incomplete information about the shared knowledge and beliefs of the people we engage with. This ability, unique to our species, poses profound challenges for our scientific understanding of the capabilities of the human mind. Deepening our understanding of these capabilities requires a combination of ideas and methods from linguistics, psychology, and computer science. Advances in this area help lay the groundwork for improvements in natural language technologies such as document summarization, paraphrasing, question answering, and machine translation, and in better identification, diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders.Within this broader research enterprise, this project focuses on the "edge of the lexicon", elucidating the conditions under which a linguistic expression begins to get stored in the mind of the native speaker who uses it, and the consequences of the expression being stored as a holistic unit. Native speakers know both productive rules that license and allow interpretation of phrases and sentences that they have never before encountered and a rich inventory of lexical items that can be combined through these productive rules. Many of these lexical items are individual words, but there is evidence that specific, frequent multi-word expressions, such as "meat and potatoes" or "large majority" may also get stored in the lexicon. This project combines artificial intelligence-based computational models, large linguistic datasets, and controlled psychological experimentation to explore the edge of the lexicon, probing how direct experience with specific multi-word expressions leads to their being stored in one's mental lexicon, how such storage is reconciled with productive knowledge in language comprehension and production, and how these expressions emerge and change over time.