Paul Deane (1994) Narrowing the Gap: Miikkulainen and The
. Psycoloquy: 5(77) Language Network (4)
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Psycoloquy 5(77): Narrowing the Gap: Miikkulainen and The
NARROWING THE GAP: MIIKKULAINEN AND THE
CONNECTIONIST MODELING OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE
Book Review of Miikkulainen on Language-Network
Paul Deane
Cognitive Modalities Project
Dataware Technologies
Ottawa, Canada
an995@freenet.carleton.ca
Abstract
Despite its early promise, connectionism has had a
minimal impact upon linguistic theory -- largely because it has
proved very difficult to scale neural network models up to the size
necessary to handle realistic linguistic data. Miikkulainen's
(1993) work on script comprehension demonstrates that such
scaling-up is possible. Miikkulainen's technique -- the
construction of a complex system incorporating multiple neural nets
-- is biologically plausible and replicates important
psycholinguistic findings about language processing. However,
Miikkulainen's system lacks the properties which most linguists
would consider diagnostic of human language. Its simple
template-matching system lacks grammatical structure (morphology
and syntax), and supports neither generativity of form nor
compositionality of semantics. These difficulties can probably be
overcome in future work, but will require connectionists to address
the mathematical and theoretical issues inherent in
multiple-network models of the sort Miikkulainen employs.
Keywords
computational modeling, connectionism, distributed neural
networks, episodic memory, lexicon, natural language processing,
scripts.
References
- Miikkulainen, R. (1993) Subsymbolic Natural Language Processing: An Integrated Model of Scripts, Lexicon and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Miikkulainen, R. (1994) Precis of: Subsymbolic Natural Language Processing: An Integrated Model of Scripts, Lexicon and Memory. PSYCOLOQUY 5(46) language-network.1.miikkulainen.
- Reigier, T.P. (1992) The Acquisition of Lexical Semantics for Spatial Terms: A Connectionist Model of Perceptual Categorization. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkekley.