What a Rational Parser Would Do

This article examines cognitive process models of human sentence comprehension based on the idea of informed search. These models are rational in the sense that they strive to find a good syntactic analysis quickly. Informed search derives a new account of garden pathing that handles traditional counterexamples. It supports a symbolic explanation for local coherence as well as an algorithmic account of entropy reduction. The models are expressed in a broad framework for theories of human sentence comprehension.

[1]  John Hale,et al.  The Information Conveyed by Words in Sentences , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[2]  Edward Gibson,et al.  A computational theory of human linguistic processing: memory limitations and processing breakdown , 1991 .

[3]  A. Weinberg.  Parameters in the theory of sentence processing: Minimal Commitment theory goes east , 1993 .

[4]  Mark Johnson,et al.  Memory requirements and local ambiguities of parsing strategies , 1991 .

[5]  John Hale,et al.  A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model , 2001, NAACL.

[6]  Martin Kay,et al.  Syntactic Process , 1979, ACL.

[7]  J. Fodor.  The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology , 1986 .

[8]  Karl G. D. Bailey,et al.  Disfluencies affect the parsing of garden-path sentences , 2003 .

[9]  Eric A. Hansen,et al.  Memory-Bounded A* Graph Search , 2002, FLAIRS.

[10]  John R. Anderson.  The Adaptive Character of Thought , 1990 .

[11]  Daniel C. Richardson,et al.  Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing , 2004 .

[12]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Actions and affordances in syntactic ambiguity resolution. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[13]  John E. Laird,et al.  A universal weak method , 1993 .

[14]  G. Miller.  Some psychological studies of grammar. , 1962 .

[15]  P. Frasconi,et al.  Learning first-pass structural attachment preferences with dynamic grammars and recursive neural networks , 2003, Cognition.

[16]  Todd R. Ferretti,et al.  Thematic Roles as Verb-specific Concepts , 1997 .

[17]  Janet Dean Fodor,et al.  Natural language parsing: How can grammars help parsers? , 1985 .

[18]  Frank Keller,et al.  A Computational Model of Prediction in Human Parsing: Unifying Locality and Surprisal Effects , 2009 .

[19]  Lars Konieczny,et al.  The Psychological Reality of Local Coherences in Sentence Processing , 2005 .

[20]  Geoffrey K. Pullum,et al.  Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar , 1985 .

[21]  Jay L. Garfield,et al.  Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural-Language Understanding , 1987 .

[22]  J. P. Thorne.  A computer model for the perception of syntactic structure , 1968, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences.

[23]  Brian Roark,et al.  Deriving lexical and syntactic expectation-based measures for psycholinguistic modeling via incremental top-down parsing , 2009, EMNLP.

[24]  John E. Laird,et al.  The soar papers : research on integrated intelligence , 1993 .

[25]  J. Fodor,et al.  The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology , 1984 .

[26]  Jay Earley,et al.  An efficient context-free parsing algorithm , 1970, Commun. ACM.

[27]  S R Speer,et al.  The influence of prosodic structure on the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities , 1996, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[28]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  An Architecturally-based Theory of Human Sentence Comprehension , 2001 .

[29]  Marc Brysbaert,et al.  Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records , 1995 .

[30]  Patrick Sturt,et al.  Monotonic Syntactic Processing : A Cross-linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis , 1996 .

[31]  M. Pickering,et al.  Structural change and reanalysis difficulty in language comprehension , 1999 .

[32]  C. Pollard,et al.  Center for the Study of Language and Information , 2022 .

[33]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model , 1978, Cognition.

[34]  Damon Tutunjian,et al.  Do We Need a Distinction between Arguments and Adjuncts? Evidence from Psycholinguistic Studies of Comprehension , 2008, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[35]  M. Tanenhaus.  Afterword The impact of “The cognitive basis for linguistic structures” , 2013 .

[36]  Robert F. Port,et al.  The Dynamical Systems Hypothesis in Cognitive Science , 2006 .

[37]  William Schuler,et al.  Broad-Coverage Parsing Using Human-Like Memory Constraints , 2010, CL.

[38]  Beatrice Santorini,et al.  Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank , 1993, CL.

[39]  Stefan Frank,et al.  Uncertainty Reduction as a Measure of Cognitive Processing Effort , 2010, CMCL@ACL.

[40]  J. Hayes.  Cognition and the development of language , 1970 .

[41]  Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,et al.  The Use of Prosody in Syntactic Disambiguation , 1991, HLT.

[42]  Donald Mitchell,et al.  Lexical guidance in human parsing: Locus and processing characteristics. , 1987 .

[43]  Steven P. Abney,et al.  Parsing arguments: Phrase structure and argument structure as determinants of initial parsing decisions. , 1991 .

[44]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  A Bayesian Model Predicts Human Parse Preference and Reading Times in Sentence Processing , 2001, NIPS.

[45]  Suzanne Stevenson,et al.  The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing. , 2002 .

[46]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[47]  Thorsten Brants,et al.  Probabilistic Parsing and Psychological Plausibility , 2000, COLING.

[48]  Julie E. Boland.  The role of verb argument structure in sentence processing: Distinguishing between syntactic and semantic effects , 1993, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

[49]  Mark Steedman,et al.  On not being led up the garden path : The use of context by the psychological syntax processor , 1985 .

[50]  T. Gelder,et al.  Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition , 1995 .

[51]  Robert C. Berwick,et al.  The Grammatical Basis of Linguistic Performance: Language Use and Acquisition , 1986 .

[52]  R. Levy.  Expectation-based syntactic comprehension , 2008, Cognition.

[53]  M. Coltheart.  Attention and Performance XII: The Psychology of Reading , 1987 .

[54]  B. Velichkovsky,et al.  Eye typing in application: A comparison of two interfacing systems with ALS patients , 2008 .

[55]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths , 1968, IEEE Trans. Syst. Sci. Cybern..

[56]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Grammar, interpretation, and processing from the lexicon , 1989 .

[57]  Thomas E. Hukari,et al.  The unity of unbounded dependency constructions , 2006 .

[58]  Bradley L. Pritchett.  Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing , 1988 .

[59]  Roger Levy,et al.  Correcting the Incorrect: Local Coherence Effects Modeled with Prior Belief Update , 2009 .

[60]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Lexical Representation and Process , 1991 .

[61]  Wolfgang Lezius,et al.  TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus , 2004 .

[62]  John Hale,et al.  Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty , 2011 .

[63]  C. J. Everett,et al.  Multiplicative Systems in Several Variables. Part I , 1948 .

[64]  Jason Eisner,et al.  Discovering syntactic deep structure via Bayesian statistics , 2002, Cogn. Sci..

[65]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness , 1985 .

[66]  Aravind K. Joshi,et al.  Mathematical and computational aspects of lexicalized grammars , 1990 .

[67]  Mark-Jan Nederhof,et al.  Generalized Left-Corner Parsing , 1993, EACL.

[68]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Subject Terms: Linguistics Language Eyes & eyesight Cognition & reasoning , 1995 .

[69]  C. S. Wetherell,et al.  Probabilistic Languages: A Review and Some Open Questions , 1980, CSUR.

[70]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Relations, Objects, and the Composition of Analogies , 2006, Cogn. Sci..

[71]  Ceriel J. H. Jacobs,et al.  Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide, 2nd edition , 2008 .

[72]  Siobhan Chapman.  Logic and Conversation , 2005 .

[73]  Jiwon Yun,et al.  Subject-Object Asymmetries in Korean Sentence Comprehension , 2010 .

[74]  E. Bach,et al.  An extension of classical transformational gram-mar , 1976 .

[75]  Bradley L. Pritchett.  Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance , 1992 .

[76]  Ronald M. Kaplan,et al.  Augmented Transition Networks as Psychological Models of Sentence Comprehension , 1971, IJCAI.

[77]  Mark Johnson,et al.  Variations on incremental interpretation , 1993, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

[78]  Noam Chomsky.  Some notes on economy of derivation and representation , 2013 .

[79]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[80]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  ON COMPREHENDING SENTENCES: SYNTACTIC PARSING STRATEGIES. , 1979 .

[81]  Edward P. Stabler,et al.  Avoid the Pedestrian’s Paradox , 1991 .

[82]  Yuki Kamide,et al.  Anticipatory Processes in Sentence Processing , 2008, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[83]  WILLIAM MARSLEN-WILSON,et al.  Linguistic Structure and Speech Shadowing at Very Short Latencies , 1973, Nature.

[84]  Allen Newell,et al.  Human Problem Solving. , 1973 .

[85]  David R. Dowty,et al.  Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives , 1985 .

[86]  Matthew W. Crocker,et al.  Rational models of comprehension : Addressing the performance paradox , 2004 .

[87]  A. Newell.  ON THE ANALYSIS OF HUMAN PROBLEM SOLVING PROTOCOLS , 1966 .

[88]  Stuart J. Russell.  Efficient Memory-Bounded Search Methods , 1992, ECAI.

[89]  L. Stowe.  Thematic Structures and Sentence Comprehension , 1989 .

[90]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.

[91]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  An Activation-Based Model of Sentence Processing as Skilled Memory Retrieval , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[92]  Andreas Stolcke,et al.  An Efficient Probabilistic Context-Free Parsing Algorithm that Computes Prefix Probabilities , 1994, CL.

[93]  Srini Narayanan,et al.  Bayesian Models of Human Sentence Processing , 1998 .

[94]  Allen Newell,et al.  The Knowledge Level , 1989, Artif. Intell..

[95]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Language as a dynamical system , 1996 .

[96]  Brian A Wandell,et al.  What's in your mind? , 2008, Nature Neuroscience.

[97]  M. Baltin,et al.  The Mental representation of grammatical relations , 1985 .

[98]  Vered Argaman,et al.  Against Repair-Based Reanalysis in Sentence Comprehension , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[99]  P. Johnson-Laird.  Mental models , 1989 .

[100]  Richard E. Korf,et al.  Space-efficient search algorithms , 1995, CSUR.

[101]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[102]  John C. Trueswell,et al.  The Convergence of Lexicalist Perspectives in Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics , 2000 .

[103]  Ceriel J. H. Jacobs,et al.  Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide , 2007, Monographs in Computer Science.

[104]  Frank Keller,et al.  Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity , 2008, Cognition.

[105]  J. Kimball.  Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language , 1973 .

[106]  Christina M. Krause,et al.  The Psychological Reality of Local Coherences in Sentence Processing , 2005 .

[107]  H. Grice.  Logic and conversation , 1975 .

[108]  Martin J. Pickering,et al.  The rational of analysis of inquiry: The case of parsing. , 1998 .

[109]  Edward Gibson,et al.  The Interaction of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Statistics in the Resolution of Syntactic Category Ambiguity. , 2006 .

[110]  T. Gelder,et al.  The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science , 1998, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[111]  Reinhold Kliegl,et al.  Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus , 2008, Journal of Eye Movement Research.

[112]  Mitchell P. Marcus,et al.  A theory of syntactic recognition for natural language , 1979 .

[113]  J. Bresnan.  Lexical-Functional Syntax , 2000 .

[114]  Risto Miikkulainen,et al.  In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 1997 .

[115]  Philip Resnik,et al.  Left-Corner Parsing and Psychological Plausibility , 1992, COLING.

[116]  H. Barlow.  Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information: David Marr. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982. pp. xvi + 397 , 1983 .

[117]  John Hale,et al.  Uncertainty About the Rest of the Sentence , 2006, Cogn. Sci..