Risto Miikkulainen draws on recent connectionist work in language comprehension tocreate a model that can understand natural language. Using the DISCERN system as an example, hedescribes a general approach to building high-level cognitive models from distributed neuralnetworks and shows how the special properties of such networks are useful in modeling humanperformance. In this approach connectionist networks are not only plausible models of isolatedcognitive phenomena, but also sufficient constituents for complete artificial intelligencesystems.Distributed neural networks have been very successful in modeling isolated cognitivephenomena, but complex high-level behavior has been tractable only with symbolic artificialintelligence techniques. Aiming to bridge this gap, Miikkulainen describes DISCERN, a completenatural language processing system implemented entirely at the subsymbolic level. In DISCERN,distributed neural network models of parsing, generating, reasoning, lexical processing, andepisodic memory are integrated into a single system that learns to read, paraphrase, and answerquestions about stereotypical narratives.Miikkulainen's work, which includes a comprehensive surveyof the connectionist literature related to natural language processing, will prove especiallyvaluable to researchers interested in practical techniques for high-level representation,inferencing, memory modeling, and modular connectionist architectures.Risto Miikkulainen is anAssistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas atAustin.

How do artificial neural networks and other forms of artificial intelligence interfere with methods and practices in the sciences? Which interdisciplinary epistemological challenges arise when we think about the use of AI beyond its dependency on big data? Not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences and the humanities seem to be increasingly affected by current approaches of subsymbolic AI, which master problems of quality (fuzziness, uncertainty) in a hitherto unknown way. But what are the conditions, implications, and effects of these (potential) epistemic transformations and how must research on AI be configured to address them adequately?

This study explores the design and application of natural language text-based processing systems, based on generative linguistics, empirical copus analysis, and artificial neural networks. It emphasizes the practical tools to accommodate the selected system.

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

This book is based on the workshop on New Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing, held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI'95, in Montreal, Canada in August 1995. Most of the 32 papers included in the book are revised selected workshop presentations; some papers were individually solicited from members of the workshop program committee to give the book an overall completeness. Also included, and written with the novice reader in mind, is a comprehensive introductory survey by the volume editors. The volume presents the state of the art in the most promising current approaches to learning for NLP and is thus compulsory reading for researchers in the field or for anyone applying the new techniques to challenging real-world NLP problems.

For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin. This book presents a series of emergentist accounts of language acquisition. Each case shows how a few simple, basic processes give rise to new levels of language complexity. The aspects of language examined here include auditory representations, phonological and articulatory processes, lexical semantics, ambiguity processing, grammaticality judgment, and sentence comprehension. The approaches that are invoked to account formally for emergent patterns include neural network theory, dynamic systems, linguistic functionalism, construction grammar, optimality theory, and statistically-driven learning. The excitement of this work lies both in the discovery of new emergent patterns and in the integration of theoretical frameworks that can formalize the theory of emergentism.

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.