Tag Archives: fuzzy logic
16 May Discourse Pragmatics
Pragmatics Context data is critical for disambiguation of words that have many possible meanings. These meanings are almost always mediated by context, therefore understanding context must precede disambiguation. For instance, when standing in a ring appears in the context of a boxing match, ring refers to a physical object with corners. The same phrase, in […]
09 May Stratum Morphology
Morphology Morphology is about what happens to words to change their structure, impacting their meaning and usage. In English, we add -s or -es at the end of words to make them plural (guy –> guys, time –> times). Japanese, on the other hand, uses reduplication (hito –>hitobito, toki –> tokidoki) to make words plural. Adding to words, affixation, has three […]
08 May Three-Dimensional Model of Language
Topographical maps of concepts in a text provide useful views of language. Fortuna et al in Semantic Knowledge Management (pp. 155-169) describe how three-dimensional topic maps can both give meaningful insights into clusters of related content, such as news stories or published papers. I have frequently stressed the importance of concept associations in the brain, in cognitive […]
05 May Learning from Errors
If at first you don’t succeed, try – try again. Humans are pretty good at learning from our mistakes. In fact, some suggest that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Today I’d like to riff on that theme a bit, and talk about ways in which machines can implement learning from errors. Error Minimization […]
05 May A Slice of Language
A Different Approach The previous section explained why we need the ground-up formulation of a new grammar for Natural Language (NL) understanding: none of the existing ones can accommodate the high demands of modern technology and approximate the paradigm of artificial intelligence as a model for human linguistic competence and performance across all linguistic phenomena. In […]
02 May Linguistic Building Blocks
Linguistic Building Blocks While languages are infinite, each has a finite number of structures, functions and attributes. Functions and attributes are the building blocks of a grammar. Grammars or languages are categorized as regular, context-free (CF), context-sensitive (CS), recursive, and recursively enumerable. A context-sensitive grammar is a powerful formalism that describes the language in terms of […]
30 Apr Exceptional Logic
Exceptions to the Rules In natural language, exceptions to rules of grammar and other characteristics are frequent, and exhibit little consistency or predictability. They may multiply in discourse and in situations where the speaker/writer’s competence is limited. Idioms and irregular verbs are common exceptions which can be quite difficult to categorize or describe using formal descriptive grammar. Further exceptions […]
25 Apr Conceptual Paradigms
Conceptual Structure The different functions of language are acquired at different stages. As described by Sowa, these functions show why semantics can be considered a guide to how we learn syntax: “First, children associate words with concrete concepts used in perceiving the world and acting upon it. Next, they learn syntactic rules for mapping concepts […]
22 Apr Breaking Down Language Structure and Function
Grammar Acquisition Some experts suggest that a correctly formulated adult grammar is acquired by children on the basis of sentences they hear in their first few years (Pinker, 1984, p. 5). The proponents of this theory assume that a young child perceives sentence structure or is able to detect elements of grammatical structure – a […]
21 Apr Language Inherited
Language Acquisition How do children acquire language? How do they learn about grammar and productively apply its general rules to creating new utterances? Some attempts to explain this phenomenon have suggested that a set of grammar rules is innate. Advocates of this theory (Chomsky 1968) point to grammatical similarities, or universals, across languages and aver that a […]