Integration of Connectionist and Symbolic Computation for Linguistic Modeling

这是一项为期三年的持续奖励IRI-9213894的第一年资助。在先前的研究中，调和语法是一种形式语言研究的方法，它依赖于一种整合连接论和符号计算的新方法。目前的研究是对这一方法的扩展，包括自然语言的形式语法和形式语言的语法。具体地说，之前的工作得到了扩展：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描述由一类新的连接主义网络对这些表示进行的计算；研究谐波语法描述形式语言的表达能力，从上下文无关语言的研究开始；分析导致递归的、嵌入不变的良构性（Harmony）函数的连接主义网络的性质；测试和谐语法处理涉及嵌入的语言问题的能力；评估我们的全分布式表征编码语言表征中句法/语义结构角色特征的有效性；将该理论扩展为包含统一的符号计算概念，并将其应用于基于统一的自然语言语法方法；研究同时实现谐波语法的数值和非数值形式化的连接解析器的有效性和时间行为；并将符号规则系统的连接主义学习的最新工作扩展到谐波语法的特殊情况。//

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.//