Toward a psycholinguistically-motivated model of language processing

  • Authors:
  • William Schuler;Tim Miller;Samir AbdelRahman;Lane Schwartz

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Minnesota;University of Minnesota;Cairo University;University of Minnesota

  • Venue:
  • COLING '08 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies suggest a model of human language processing that 1) performs incremental interpretation of spoken utterances or written text, 2) preserves ambiguity by maintaining competing analyses in parallel, and 3) operates within a severely constrained short-term memory store --- possibly constrained to as few as four distinct elements. This paper describes a relatively simple model of language as a factored statistical time-series process that meets all three of the above desiderata; and presents corpus evidence that this model is sufficient to parse naturally occurring sentences using human-like bounds on memory.