representation of input text in a conversation

[Bonnie John]

At 4:06 AM 11/10/98, Niels Taatgen wrote:
>...An alternative way to process a
>sentence is to read in the words one by one, and gradually build an
>interpretation. If I remember correctly, this is the way a Soar model
>(NL-Soar) did this....


Yes, that's how NL-Soar works.

It gives you good match to human sentence processing of things like
garden-path sentences (the ones where they take a sudden unexpected turn
and you say "huh?" and then reinterpret, like
"The robber ran to the bank


and jumped in the river."
It also predicts which sentences will be hard to parse in several languages.

_If_ you need that much of a NL processor, you might consider using NL-Soar
as a guide for an ACT-R model.  Rick Lewis at Ohio State did NL-Soar and I
believe there are several papers about it in the Linguistics literature, as
well as his thesis and subsequent work.

Bonnie