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