This book tries to answer the question posed by Minsky at the
beginning of "The Society of Mind: " "to explain the mind, we have
to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that
are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd considered smart."
The author believes that cognition should not be rooted in innate
rules and primitives, but rather grounded in human memory. More
specifically, he suggests viewing linguistic comprehension as a
time-constrained process -- a race for building an interpretation
in short term memory.
After reviewing existing psychological and computational
approaches to text understanding and concluding that they generally
rely on self-validating primitives, the author abandons this
objectivist and normative approach to meaning and develops a set of
requirements for a grounded cognitive architecture. He then goes on
to explain how this architecture must avoid all epistemological
commitments, be tractable both with respect to space and time, and,
most importantly, account for the diachronic and non-deterministic
nature of comprehension. In other words, a text may or may not lead
to an interpretation for a specific reader, and may be associated
with several interpretations over time by one reader.
Throughout the remainder of the book, the author demonstrates that
rules for all major facets of comprehension -- syntax, reference
resolution, quantification, lexical and structural disambiguation,
inference and subject matter -- can be expressed in terms of the
simple mechanistic computing elements of a massively parallel
network modeling memory. These elements, called knowledge units,
work in a limited amount of time and have the ability not only to
recognize but also to build the structures that make up an
interpretation.
Designed as a main text for graduate courses, this volume is
essential to the fields of cognitive science, artificial
intelligence, memory modeling, text understanding, computational
linguistics and natural language understanding. Other areas of
application are schema-matching, hermeneutics, local connectionism,
and text linguistics. With its extensive bibliography, the book is
also valuable as supplemental reading for introductory
undergraduate courses in cognitive science and computational
linguistics.
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