The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research.
A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself.
A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields.
Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.
1. Cover image - p. Cover 2. Title page - p. Cover 3. Table of Contents - p. Cover 4. Copyright - p. Cover 5. Foreword - p. Cover 6. Preface - p. ix 7. PART I: COMPUTER MODELS - p. 9 8. Chapter 1: Word Expert Parsing Revisited in a Cognitive Science Perspective - p. 9 9. Chapter 2: Lexical Ambiguity Resolution in a Deterministic Parser - p. 43 10. Chapter 3: Resolving Lexical Ambiguity Computationally with Spreading Activation and Polaroid Words - p. 71 11. Chapter 4: Are Vague Words Ambiguous? - p. 107 12. Chapter 5: Disambiguation in a Lexically Based Sentence Understanding System - p. 128 13. Chapter 6: An Account of Coherence, Semantic Relations, Metonymy, and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - p. 150 14. Chapter 7: A Model of Lexical Access of Ambiguous Words - p. 177 15. Chapter 8: Distributed Representations of Ambiguous Words and Their Resolution in a Connectionist Network - p. 194 16. Chapter 9: Process Synchronization, Lexical Ambiguity Resolution, and Aphasia - p. 228 17. PART II: EMPIRICAL STUDIES - p. 267 18. Chapter 10: Implications of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution for Word Recognition and Comprehension - p. 267 19. Chapter 11: Lexical Processing and Ambiguity Resolution: An Autonomous Process in an Interactive Box - p. 288 20. Chapter 12: Is Multiple Access an Artifact of Backward Priming? - p. 310 21. Chapter 13: Sentential Context and Lexical Access - p. 329 22. Chapter 14: The Verb Mutability Effect: Studies of the Combinatorial Semantics of Nouns and Verbs - p. 342 23. Chapter 15: (Almost) Never Letting Go: Inference Retention during Text Understanding - p. 382 24. Chapter 16: Neuropsychology of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: The Contribution of Divided Visual Field Studies - p. 409 25. Chapter 17: Tracking the Time Course of Meaning Activation - p. 430 26. Chapter 18: Cognitive Topology and Lexical Networks - p. 475 27. Index - p. 508
The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research.
A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself.
A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields.
Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.
1. Cover image - p. Cover 2. Title page - p. Cover 3. Table of Contents - p. Cover 4. Copyright - p. Cover 5. Foreword - p. Cover 6. Preface - p. ix 7. PART I: COMPUTER MODELS - p. 9 8. Chapter 1: Word Expert Parsing Revisited in a Cognitive Science Perspective - p. 9 9. Chapter 2: Lexical Ambiguity Resolution in a Deterministic Parser - p. 43 10. Chapter 3: Resolving Lexical Ambiguity Computationally with Spreading Activation and Polaroid Words - p. 71 11. Chapter 4: Are Vague Words Ambiguous? - p. 107 12. Chapter 5: Disambiguation in a Lexically Based Sentence Understanding System - p. 128 13. Chapter 6: An Account of Coherence, Semantic Relations, Metonymy, and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - p. 150 14. Chapter 7: A Model of Lexical Access of Ambiguous Words - p. 177 15. Chapter 8: Distributed Representations of Ambiguous Words and Their Resolution in a Connectionist Network - p. 194 16. Chapter 9: Process Synchronization, Lexical Ambiguity Resolution, and Aphasia - p. 228 17. PART II: EMPIRICAL STUDIES - p. 267 18. Chapter 10: Implications of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution for Word Recognition and Comprehension - p. 267 19. Chapter 11: Lexical Processing and Ambiguity Resolution: An Autonomous Process in an Interactive Box - p. 288 20. Chapter 12: Is Multiple Access an Artifact of Backward Priming? - p. 310 21. Chapter 13: Sentential Context and Lexical Access - p. 329 22. Chapter 14: The Verb Mutability Effect: Studies of the Combinatorial Semantics of Nouns and Verbs - p. 342 23. Chapter 15: (Almost) Never Letting Go: Inference Retention during Text Understanding - p. 382 24. Chapter 16: Neuropsychology of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: The Contribution of Divided Visual Field Studies - p. 409 25. Chapter 17: Tracking the Time Course of Meaning Activation - p. 430 26. Chapter 18: Cognitive Topology and Lexical Networks - p. 475 27. Index - p. 508
