The language complexity game

From the Publisher: "How can language be both complex and subtle, yet simple and effortless? Eric Ristad's book tackles this deepest of questions with all the power and precision of modern computer science, coming up with the best analysis of human language complexity since Chomsky's famous demonstrations that natural languages cannot be described via simple linear patterns." -- Robert C. Berwick, MIT "Eric Ristad's carefully reasoned and penetrating study brings together the theories of language structure and computational complexity in a most productive way, providing much new insight into the nature and use of language." -- Noam Chomsky, MIT This monograph establishes a conceptually coherent and technically sound framework for the computational study of human language. The fundamental method of this framework is an adversarial game between two players, the first of whom attempts to establish that language is more complex than previously thought, and the second who tries to establish that language is less complex than previously thought. The expected outcome of such a language complexity game is a precise computational theory of language, that is empirically correct in all computationally significant respects. Ristad exemplifies this powerful framework with a far-ranging and detailed investigation of language computations related to anaphora. Artificial Intelligence series