Parallel distributed processing and role assignment constraints
James L. McClelland · 1987
My work in natural language processing is based on the premise that it is not in general possible to recover the underlying representations of sentences wilhout considering semantic constraints on their possible case structures, it seems clear that people use these constraints to do several things: To assign constituents to the proper ease roles and attach then to the proper other constituents.To assign the appropriate reading to a word or larger constituent when it occurs in context.To assign default values to missing constituents.To instantiate the concepts referenced by the words in a sentence so that they fit the context.I believe that parallel-distributed processing models (i.e., conneelionist models which make use of distributed representations) provide the mechanisms that are needed for these lasks.Argument altachments and role assignments seem to require a consideration of the relative merits of competing possibilities (Marcus, 1980; Bates and MacWhinney, 1987;MaeWhinney, 1987), as deles lexical dlsambigualion.Conuectionist models provide a very natural substrate for these kinds of competition processes (Cottrell, 1985; Wallz and Pollack, 1985).