Preprints available

[Gabriele Scheler]

Dear connectionists,

a number of preprints on neuronal and statistical models of linguistic 
functions are available from my homepage now.

The URL is:

http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~scheler/publications.html

Gabriele Scheler
Institut fuer Informatik
TU Muenchen
D 80290 Muenchen

present address:
ICSI                   
1947 Center Street     
Berkeley, Ca. 94704    

I include titles, abstracts and bibliographic references for two recent
papers:

  -------------------------------------------------------------------
Scheler, Gabriele and Kerstin Fischer:
The many functions of discourse particles: A computational model.
to appear in Proceedings of Cognitive Science 1997.
  -------------------------------------------------------------------

 We present a connectionist model for the interpretation of discourse 
 particles in real dialogues that is based on neuronal principles of 
 categorization (categorical perception, prototype formation, contextual 
 interpretation). 
 It can be shown that discourse particles operate just like other 
 morphological and lexical items with respect to interpretation processes.
 The description proposed locates discourse particles in an elaborate model of 
 communication which incorporates many different aspects of the
 communicative situation. We therefore also attempt to explore the content
 of the category discourse particle. 
 We present a detailed analysis of the meaning assignment problem and
 show that 80% - 90% correctness for unseen discourse particles can be
 reached with the feature analysis provided.
 Furthermore, we show that `analogical transfer' from one discourse 
 particle to another is facilitated if prototypes are computed and 
 used as the basis for generalization.
 We conclude that the interpretation processes which are a part of the human
 cognitive system are very similar with respect to different linguistic items.
 However, the analysis of discourse particles shows clearly that any
 explanatory theory of language needs to incorporate a theory of
 communication processes.

  -------------------------------------------------------------------
Scheler,G. Feature-based Perception of Semantic Concepts. to appear:
Freksa(ed.) Computation and Cognition, Springer 1997.
  -------------------------------------------------------------------
 In this paper we point to some principles of neural computation 
 as they have been derived from experimental and theoretical studies 
 primarily on vision. We argue that these principles are well suited to 
 explain some characteristics of the linguistic function of semantic concept 
 recognition.  Computational models built on these principles have been 
 applied to morphological-grammatical categories (aspect), function words 
 (determiners) and discourse particles in spoken language. We suggest a 
 few ways in which these studies may be extended to include more detail
 on neural functions into the computational model.