VIEWING PARSING AS WORD SENSE DISCRIMINATION: A CONNECTIONIST APPROACH.

This paper advocates the interdisciplinary development of a computational theory of human language comprehension and proposes a collection of initial constraints from which to start on such an enterprise. In order to satisfy these constraints, our modeling effort employs an architecture significantly different from the typical computer and closer to that of the human brain. We use a particular spreading activation or active semantic network scheme, called connectionism, which entails a massive number of appropriately connected computing units that communicate through weighted levels of excitation and inhibition. While such an architecture does not solve any problems per se, we believe that a number of questions become easier to set forth and more straightforward to solve. This paper surveys a number of fundamental language comprehension issues from the new perspective, and presents some simulation results of a parsing model based on these considerations.