gross@NPRDC.ARPA (Michelle Gross) (03/05/86)
Subject: SD SIGART-NLP meetings--Last and Next We've been meeting the first Monday of each month. Last night's meeting (our 3rd) covered Dr. Bob La Quey's efforts to write a program that acquires language by determining which grammatical rules are needed to parse incrementally more complex text. The main difficulty with his approach seems to be how to prevent adding spurious rules when ungrammatical sentences sneak through. Someone suggested attaching a reliability index to each rule. The index would be based on how often the rule has successfully helped a parse get through. (The hope is that the ad hoc rules for ungrammatical input would have low index values). We also discovered that the only given rule in the grammar (S --> N V Terminator) prevented the program from creating a rule to parse imperative sentences (S --> V). Mallory Selfridge's 1981 IJCAI paper ``A Computer Model of Child Language Acquisition'' provided some of the impetus for Bob's work. His talk was entitled ``A Model of Language Acquisition.'' Our next meeting will be April 7th. The topic will be the lexicon--how we use it and how a computer can use it. I volunteered to present some relevant linguistic and computational literature. I plan to discuss how the lexicon is viewed in Transformational Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Relational Grammar (I don't know enough about GPSG to touch on that perspective). I plan to discuss Cherry's paper on the UNIX tool PARTS (a program from the Writer's Workbench that assigns parts of speech by rule). I would also like to discuss the data structures used in various dictionary projects. Can anyone provide pointers to such information for the OED or Webster's projects? Any other references or abstracts you can send would only enrich our provincial San Diegan discussions! I have a 1982 IEEE article on PARTS and Cherry's 1978 paper--are there are more recent references? For more information on the SIG, you may contact Ed Weaver at work at (619) 236-5963. I'll forward any electronic responses on to him. Thanks, Michelle gross@nprdc.ARPA ...ihnp4!sdcsvax!sdcc6!ix713 (UUCP) Navy Personnel R&D Center UCSD Linguistics, C-008 San Diego, CA. 92152-6800 La Jolla, CA. 92093