Integration of Connectionist and Symbolic Computation for Linguistic Modeling

这是IRI-9213894三年持续奖的第一年资助。在以前的研究中，一种形式化的语言研究方法--和谐语法--依赖于一种将连接主义和符号计算相结合的新方法。目前的研究是对这一方法的扩展，涉及自然语言的形式语法和形式语言的语法。具体地说，扩展了以前的工作：包括递归的、完全分布的连接主义表示；开发一种明确的符号编程语言来表征由一类新的连接主义网络执行的关于这些表示的计算；从上下文无关语言的研究开始，研究调和语法对描述形式语言的表达能力；分析导致递归、嵌入不变的良构(和声)函数的连接主义网络的性质；测试和声语法处理关键涉及嵌入的语言问题的能力；评估我们的完全分布式表示在编码语言表示中的句法/语义结构角色的特征方面的有效性；扩展该理论以纳入统一的符号计算概念，并将其应用于自然语言语法的基于统一的方法；研究同时实现调和语法的数值和非数值形式化的连接主义解析器的有效性和时间行为；以及将最近关于符号规则系统的连接主义学习的工作扩展到调和语法的特定情况。//

This is the first-year funding of a three-year continuing award IRI-9213894. In previous research, an approach to the formal study of language, Harmonic Grammar, relies on a novel means of integrating connectionist and symbolic computation. The current research studies extensions of this approach, concerning formal grammars of natural languages and grammars of formal languages. Specifically, the previous work is extended: to encompass recursive, fully distributed connectionist representations; to develop an explicit symbolic programming language to characterize the computations over these representations carried out by a new class of connectionist networks; to study the expressive power of Harmonic Grammar to describe formal languages, starting with a study of context-free languages; to analyze the properties of connectionist networks that lead to a recursive, embedding- invariant well-formedness (Harmony) function; to test the ability of Harmonic Grammar to deal with linguistic problems crucially involving embedding; to assess the effectiveness of our fully distributed representations for encoding the features of syntactic/semantic structural roles in linguistic representations; to extend the theory to incorporate the symbolic computational notion of unification, and to apply it to unification-based approaches to natural language grammar; to study the effectiveness and temporal behavior of connectionist parsers that implement both the numerical and nonnumerical formalizations of Harmonic Grammar; and to extend recent work on connectionist learning of symbolic rule systems to the particular case of Harmonic Grammar.//