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A multi-processing approach to natural language

Published: 04 June 1973 Publication History

Abstract

Natural languages such as English are exceedingly complicated media for the communication of information, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Computer systems that attempt to process natural languages in more than the most trivial ways are correspondingly complex. Not only must they be capable of dealing with elaborate descriptions of how the language is put together (in the form of large dictionaries, grammars, sets of inference strategies, etc.), but they must also be able to coordinate the activities and interactions of the many different components that use these descriptions. For example, speech understanding systems of the sort that are currently being developed under ARPA sponsorship must have procedures for the reception of speech input, phonological segmentation and word recognition, dictionary consultation, and morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses. The problems of coordination and control are reduced only slightly in less ambitious projects such as question answering, automatic programming, content analysis, and information retrieval. Of course, large-scale software systems in other domains might rival natural language programs in terms of the number and complexity of individual components. The central theme of the present paper, however, is that natural language control problems have a fundamentally different character from those of most other systems and require a somewhat unusual solution: the many natural language procedures should be conceptualized and implemented as a collection of asynchronous communicating parallel processes.

References

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Friedman, J., "A computer system for transformational grammar," Communications of the ACM 12, pp. 341--348, 1969.
[2]
Kaplan, R., "A general syntactic processor," in Rustin, R., (ed.), Natural Language Processing. Algorithmics Press, New York 1973.
[3]
Kay, M., Experiments with a powerful parser, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, RM-5452-PR, 1967.
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Minsky, M., Papert, S., Research at the Laboratory Envision, Language and Other Problems of Intelligence, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Memo No. 252, 1972.
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Winograd, T., Understanding Natural Language, New York, Academic Press, 1972.
[6]
Woods, W., Transition network grammars for natural language analysis. Communications of the ACM 13, pp. 591--606.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AFIPS '73: Proceedings of the June 4-8, 1973, national computer conference and exposition
June 1973
936 pages
ISBN:9781450379168
DOI:10.1145/1499586
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 1973

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  • (2003)Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehensionJournal of Memory and Language10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00515-648:1(67-91)Online publication date: Jan-2003
  • (1988)Object-oriented parallel parsing for context-free grammarsProceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 210.3115/991719.991794(773-778)Online publication date: 22-Aug-1988
  • (1982)On the order of wordsLinguistics and Philosophy10.1007/BF003608044:4(517-558)Online publication date: 1982
  • (1981)Chart parsing and rule schemata in PSGProceedings of the 19th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics10.3115/981923.981966(167-172)Online publication date: 29-Jun-1981
  • (1975)A best-first parserIEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing10.1109/TASSP.1975.116271823:5(426-432)Online publication date: Oct-1975

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