An On-Line Computational Model of Human Sentence Interpretation

Natural Language

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 10

Natural Language: Intepretation

Models of parsing or of sentence interpretation generally fall into one of three paradigms. The Zinguistic paradigm is concerned with computational models of linguistic theories, the computational paradigm with the computationally best process for computing the meaning or structure of a sentence, and the psychological paradigm with psychological modeling of human interpretation of language. Rarely have models attempted to cross disciplinary boundaries and meet the criteria imposed by each of these paradigms. This paper describes a model of human sentence intepretation which addresses the fundamental goals of each of these paradigms. These goals include the need to produce a high-level and semantically rich representation of the meaning of the sentence, to include a motivated and declarative theory of linguistic knowledge which captures linguistic generalizations, and to account in a principled manner for psycholinguistic results.