Harmonic Grammar Part 1 & 2 - Technical Reports Available

[Yoshiro Miyata]

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	      Technical Report CU-CS-464-90

		   Harmonic Grammar -
	A formal multi-level connectionist theory of
	 linguistic well-formedness: An application

		   Geraldine Legendre
		     Yoshiro Miyata
		     Paul Smolensky

	    University of Colorado at Boulder

We describe "harmonic grammar", a connectionist-based approach to
formal theories of linguistic well-formedness.  The general approach
can be applied to various kinds of linguistic well-formedness, e.g.,
phonological and syntactic.  Here, we address a syntactic problem:
unaccusativity.  Harmonic grammar is a two-level theory, involving a
distributed, lower level connectionist network whose relevant
aggregate computational behavior is described by a local, higher level
network.  The central hypothesis is that the connectionist
well-formedness measure called "harmony" can be used to model
linguistic well-formedness; what is crucial about the relation between
the lower and higher level networks is that there is a
harmony-preserving mapping between them: they are "isoharmonic" (at
least approximately).  A companion paper (Legendre, Miyata, &
Smolensky, 1990) describes the theoretical basis for the two level
approach, starting from general connectionist principles.  In this
paper, we discuss the problem of unaccusativity, give a high level
characterization of harmonic syntax, and present a higher level
network to account for unaccusativity data in French.  We interpret
this network as a fragment of the grammar and lexicon of French
expressed in "soft rules."  Of the 760 sentence types represented in
our data, the network correctly predicts the acceptability in all but
two cases.  This coverage of real, problematic syntactic data greatly
exceeds that of any other formal account of unaccusativity of which we
are aware.

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	      Technical Report CU-CS-465-90

		     Harmonic Grammar -
	    A formal multi-level connectionist theory of
	 linguistic well-formedness: Theoretical foundations

		     Geraldine Legendre
		       Yoshiro Miyata
		       Paul Smolensky

		University of Colorado at Boulder

In this paper, we derive the formalism of "harmonic grammar", a
connectionist-based theory of linguistic well-formedness.  Harmonic
grammar is a two-level theory, involving a low level connectionist
network using a particular kind of distributed representation, and a
second, higher level network that uses local representations and which
approximately and incompletely describes the aggregate computational
behavior of the lower level network.  The central hypothesis is that
the connectionist well-formedness measure "harmony" can be used to
model linguistic well-formedness; what is crucial about the relation
between the lower and higher level networks is that there is a
harmony-preserving mapping between them: they are "isoharmonic" (at
least approximately).  In a companion paper (Legendre, Miyata, &
Smolensky, 1990), we apply harmonic grammar to a syntactic problem,
unaccusativity, and show that the resulting network is capable of a
degree of coverage of difficult data that is unparallelled by symbolic
approaches of which we are aware: of the 760 sentence types
represented in our data, the network correctly predicts the
acceptability in all but two cases.  In the present paper, we describe
the theoretical basis for the two level approach, illustrating the
general theory through the derivation from first principles of the
unaccusativity network of Legendre, Miyata, & Smolensky (1990).