Toward connectionist semantics
Garrison W. Cottrell · 1987
Much of the study of language has centered around the study of syntax, to the detriment of semantics and pragmatics.Part of the reason for this may be akin to the motivation of the besotted gentleman on his hands and knees beneath a streetlamp, who, when queried as to why he is looking on the sidewalk for the keys he lost in the alley, replies: "Because the light is better here!"I believe it is time to start mucking about in the alley; the keys are there.I also think we have a new flashlight: Parallel Distributed Processing 2. PDP mechanisms allow us to build machines whose fundamental operations include best fit search, constraint relaxation and automatic generalization.These are useful properties for processing language.I think the application of these models to NLP will change our view of what constitutes "semantics'.I will argue that in order to deal with meaning seriously, we have to move beyond the folkpsychological level of symbols, and represent the microstructure of symbols.This is more than a granularity issue.It also has to do with the grounding of meaning in perception.It is on the level of microfeatures that I believe this grounding occurs, and PDP gives us a way to express this interface between language and perception.