The Development of Collative Semantics Including a Parallel Processing Implementation

这项研究调查了计算机系统对自然语言的理解。具体目标是：1)描述自然语言中使用的词语的歧义如何从语境和“语义关系”--连接词语可能的替代意义的基本结构--来解决。2)开发了一个使用语义关系方法自动进行自然语言处理的计算机系统Meta5。这一发展的一个主要特点是使用并行处理，许多计算单元同时运行以分析自然语言输入。这项研究的意义在于，自然语言处理系统，无论是机器翻译、用户界面还是基于知识的系统，都必须克服这样一个基本问题，即普通单词具有多种含义，并且必须为每个出现的单词找到正确的含义。这项任务的处理要求使得必须探索并行处理和其他方法来极大地提高与该问题有关的计算能力。

This research investigates natural language comprehension by computer systems. Specific targets are to: 1) Describe how the ambiguity of words used in natural language may be resolved from context and "semantic relations" - the underlying structures connecting the possible alternative meanings of words. 2) Develop a computer system, meta5, which automatically carries out natural language processing, using the semantic relations approach. A key feature of this development is the use of parallel processing, with many computing elements operating simultaneously to analyse the natural language input. The significance of this research is that natural language processing systems, for machine translation, user interfaces, and knowledge based systems, must overcome the fundamental problem that ordinary words have many meanings, and the right one must be found for each occurrence. The processing requirements of this task make it essential to explore parallel processing and other means of greatly increasing the computing power brought to bear on the problem.