Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California at Berkeley.

Connection science is a new information-processing paradigm which attempts to imitate the architecture and process of the brain, and brings together researchers from disciplines as diverse as computer science, physics, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, biology, engineering, neuroscience and AI. Work in Connectionist Natural Language Processing (CNLP) is now expanding rapidly, yet much of the work is still only available in journals, some of them quite obscure. To make this research more accessible this book brings together an important and comprehensive set of articles from the journal CONNECTION SCIENCE which represent the state of the art in Connectionist natural language processing; from speech recognition to discourse comprehension. While it is quintessentially Connectionist, it also deals with hybrid systems, and will be of interest to both theoreticians as well as computer modellers. Range of topics covered: Connectionism and Cognitive Linguistics Motion, Chomsky's Government-binding Theory Syntactic Transformations on Distributed Representations Syntactic Neural Networks A Hybrid Symbolic/Connectionist Model for Understanding of Nouns Connectionism and Determinism in a Syntactic Parser Context Free Grammar Recognition Script Recognition with Hierarchical Feature Maps Attention Mechanisms in Language Script-Based Story Processing A Connectionist Account of Similarity in Vowel Harmony Learning Distributed Representations Connectionist Language Users Representation and Recognition of Temporal Patterns A Hybrid Model of Script Generation Networks that Learn about Phonological Features Pronunciation in Text-to-Speech Systems

Originally published in 1992, when connectionist natural language processing (CNLP) was a new and burgeoning research area, this book represented a timely assessment of the state of the art in the field. It includes contributions from some of the best known researchers in CNLP and covers a wide range of topics. The book comprises four main sections dealing with connectionist approaches to semantics, syntax, the debate on representational adequacy, and connectionist models of psycholinguistic processes. The semantics and syntax sections deal with a variety of approaches to issues in these traditional linguistic domains, covering the spectrum from pure connectionist approaches to hybrid models employing a mixture of connectionist and classical AI techniques. The debate on the fundamental suitability of connectionist architectures for dealing with natural language processing is the focus of the section on representational adequacy. The chapters in this section represent a range of positions on the issue, from the view that connectionist models are intrinsically unsuitable for all but the associationistic aspects of natural language, to the other extreme which holds that the classical conception of representation can be dispensed with altogether. The final section of the book focuses on the application of connectionist models to the study of psycholinguistic processes. This section is perhaps the most varied, covering topics from speech perception and speech production, to attentional deficits in reading. An introduction is provided at the beginning of each section which highlights the main issues relating to the section topic and puts the constituent chapters into a wider context.

arise automatically as a result of the recursive structure of the task and the continuous nature of the SRN's state space. Elman also introduces a new graphical technique for study ing network behavior based on principal components analysis. He shows that sentences with multiple levels of embedding produce state space trajectories with an intriguing self similar structure. The development and shape of a recurrent network's state space is the subject of Pollack's paper, the most provocative in this collection. Pollack looks more closely at a connectionist network as a continuous dynamical system. He describes a new type of machine learning phenomenon: induction by phase transition. He then shows that under certain conditions, the state space created by these machines can have a fractal or chaotic structure, with a potentially infinite number of states. This is graphically illustrated using a higher-order recurrent network trained to recognize various regular languages over binary strings. Finally, Pollack suggests that it might be possible to exploit the fractal dynamics of these systems to achieve a generative capacity beyond that of finite-state machines.

The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, comprising of seven volumes, now in its fourth edition, compiles the contributions of major researchers and practitioners and explores the cultural institutions of more than 30 countries. This major reference presents over 550 entries extensively reviewed for accuracy in seven print volumes or online. The new fourth edition, which includes 55 new entires and 60 revised entries, continues to reflect the growing convergence among the disciplines that influence information and the cultural record, with coverage of the latest topics as well as classic articles of historical and theoretical importance.

Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes: A Perspective on the State of the Art focuses on a currently emerging body of research. With the reemergence of neural networks in the 1980s with their emphasis on overcoming some of the limitations of symbolic AI, there is clearly a need to support some form of high-level symbolic processing in connectionist networks. As argued by many researchers, on both the symbolic AI and connectionist sides, many cognitive tasks, e.g. language understanding and common sense reasoning, seem to require high-level symbolic capabilities. How these capabilities are realized in connectionist networks is a difficult question and it constitutes the focus of this book. Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes addresses the underlying architectural aspects of the integration of neural and symbolic processes. In order to provide a basis for a deeper understanding of existing divergent approaches and provide insight for further developments in this field, this book presents: (1) an examination of specific architectures (grouped together according to their approaches), their strengths and weaknesses, why they work, and what they predict, and (2) a critique/comparison of these approaches. Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes is of interest to researchers, graduate students, and interested laymen, in areas such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, and neurocomputing, in keeping up-to-date with the newest research trends. It is a comprehensive, in-depth introduction to this new emerging field.