Toward Connectionist Parsing

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Cognitive Modeling

The parsing of natural language is the product of dense interactions among various comprehension processes. We believe that traditional models have greatly underestimated the richness of these interactions. We propose a model for low-level parsing which is massively parallel, highly distributed, and highly connected. The model suggests a solution to the problem of word sense disambiguation which is psychologically plausible and computationally feasible. The paper outlines the general connectionist paradigm followed by a brief description of a three-level network to do parsing. Finally we trace through an example to illustrate the functioning of the model.