Princeton University Cognitive Studies Talk

[Laura Hawkins]

TITLE: Connectionist Language Users
SPEAKER: Robert Allen,  Bell Communications Research
DATE: September 26
LOCATION: Princeton University Langfeld Lounge, Green Hall
          Corner of Washington Road and Williams Street
TIME: Noon

ABSTRACT:
An important property of neural networks is their ability to
integrate  various sources of information through activation
values.  By presenting both "verbal" and "perceptual"  codes
a sequential back-propagation network may be trained to "use
language." For instance, networks can answer questions about
objects  that  appear in a perceptual microworld.  Moreover,
this paradigm handles many problems of  reference,  such  as
pronoun  anaphora,  quite  naturally.   Thus  this approach,
which may be termed  Connectionist  Language  Users  (CLUs),
introduces  a  computational  linguistics  that is holistic.
Extensions to be  discussed  include  the  use  of  relative
clauses, action verbs, grammars, planning in a blocks world,
and multi-agent "conversations."