Passing Markers: A Theory of Contextual Influence in Language Comprehension*

Most Artificial Intelligence theories of language either assume a syntactic component which serves as “front end” for the rest of the system, or else reject all attempts at distinguishing modules within the comprehension system. In this paper we will present an alternative which, while keeping modularity, will account for several puzzles for typical “syntax first” theories. The major addition to this theory is a “marker passing” (or “spreading activation”) component, which operates in parallel to the normal syntactic component.

[1]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Understanding natural language , 1974 .

[2]  Christopher K. Riesbeck,et al.  Comprehension by computer : expectation-based analysis of sentences in context , 1976 .

[3]  Michael Lebowitz,et al.  Generalization and memory in an integrated understanding system , 1980 .

[4]  Yorick Wilks,et al.  An intelligent analyzer and understander of English , 1975, Commun. ACM.

[5]  Philip J. Hayes.  On Semantic Nets, Frames and Associations , 1977, IJCAI.

[6]  Douglas Wong.  Language Comprehension in a Problem Solver , 1981, IJCAI.

[7]  Steven L. Small,et al.  Word Expert Parsing , 1979, ACL.

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

[9]  Bonnie L. Webber,et al.  Knowledge Representation for Syntactic/Semantic Processing , 1980, AAAI.

[10]  David Scott Warren,et al.  A parsing method for montague grammars , 1978 .

[11]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty , 1980, CSUR.

[12]  M. Ross Quillian,et al.  Retrieval time from semantic memory , 1969 .

[13]  J. Flavell.  Metacognitive aspects of problem solving , 1976 .

[14]  Ronald J. Brachman,et al.  ON THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL STATUS OF SEMANTIC NETWORKS , 1979 .

[15]  Eugene Charniak.  Six Topics in Search of a Parser: An Overview of AI Language Research , 1981, IJCAI.

[16]  Eugene Charniak,et al.  The Case-Slot Identity Theory* , 1981 .

[17]  Allan Collins,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing , 1975 .

[18]  William A. Woods,et al.  Procedural semantics for a question-answering machine , 1899, AFIPS Fall Joint Computing Conference.

[19]  D. Swinney.  Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects , 1979 .

[20]  Eugene Charniak,et al.  A Common Representation for Problem-Solving and Language-Comprehension Information , 1981, Artif. Intell..

[21]  Scott E. Fahlman,et al.  NETL: A System for Representing and Using Real-World Knowledge , 1979, CL.