Toward a Psycholinguistically-Motivated Model of Language Processing

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 humanlike bounds on memory.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: COLING
• Authors: William Schuler, Samir AbdelRahman, Tim Miller, Lane Schwartz
• Keywords: COLING 2008, Computational Linguistics, Factored Statistical Time-series, Performs Incremental Interpretation, Short-term Memory Store