Parallel Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences

摘要

How do we assign nouns correctly to their underlying case roles in English, and how do we select an appropriate verb frame to assign these nouns to. How do we know whether a noun phrase is a modifier of a preceding noun phrase or an argument of the verb. How do we select the correct meaning of each noun in the sentence, and how do we allow content to modulate its meaning. How do we know how to handle these new nouns and verbs. In this article we describe a simulation model that addresses these questions from a perspective quite different from the conventional perspective found in Computational Linguistics. Words are treated as patterns of activation, and knowledge about them is stored in distributed form, in the connections in a large network of simple neutron-like processing units. The model exhibits considerable facility in dealing with the problems of frame selection, role assignment, disambiguation, etc, and suggests a natural way to resolve unappealing aspects of the idea that there is a fixed set of individuated case roles. So far, our simulation model can only process one clause sentences. Possible extensions to multi-clause sentences are described.