2 TRs available

[Andreas Stolcke]

The following Technical Reports are available.  Please refer to the end of
this message for information on how to obtain them.

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MINIATURE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:
A TOUCHSTONE FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Jerome A. Feldman, George Lakoff, Andreas Stolcke and Susan Hollbach Weber
International Computer Science Institute

Technical Report TR-90-009
March 1990

ABSTRACT

Cognitive Science, whose genesis was interdisciplinary, shows signs of
reverting to a disjoint collection of fields.  This paper presents a
compact, theory-free task that inherently requires an integrated
solution.  The basic problem is learning a subset of an arbitrary
natural language from picture-sentence pairs. We describe a very
specific instance of this task and show how it presents fundamental
(but not impossible) challenges to several areas of cognitive science
including vision, language, inference and learning.

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LEARNING FEATURE-BASED SEMANTICS WITH SIMPLE RECURRENT NETWORKS

Andreas Stolcke
International Computer Science Institute

Technical Report TR-90-015
April 1990

ABSTRACT

The  paper  investigates  the possibilities  for  using  simple
recurrent  networks as transducers which map sequential natural
language input into non-sequential feature-based semantics.   The
networks  perform well on  sentences containing a  single main
predicate (encoded  by  transitive  verbs  or  prepositions)  applied
to  multiple-feature objects (encoded  as  noun-phrases  with
adjectival  modifiers),  and  shows  robustness against ungrammatical
inputs.   A  second  set of  experiments  deals with  sentences
containing embedded  structures.     Here  the  network  is  able  to
process  multiple  levels  of sentence-final embeddings but only one
level of center-embedding.  This turns out to be a consequence of the
network's inability to retain information that is not reflected in the
outputs over intermediate  phases of processing.   Two extensions to
Elman's original recurrent network architecture are introduced.

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[Versions of these papers have been submitted to the 12th Annual
Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.]

The reports can be obtained as compressed PostScript files from host
cis.ohio-state.edu via anonymous ftp.  The filenames are

	feldman.tr90-9.ps.Z	and
	stolcke.tr90-15.ps.Z

in directory /pub/neuroprose.

Hardcopies may be requested via e-mail to

	weber at icsi.berkeley.edu		or
	stolcke at icsi.berkeley.edu

or physical mail to one of the authors at the following address:

	International Computer Science Institute
	1947 Center Street, Suite 600
	Berkeley, CA 94704
	U.S.A.

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Andreas Stolcke