Modelling Parsing Constraints with High-dimensional Context Space

It is proposed that HAL's high-dim ensional context space can be used to provide a basic categorisation of semantic and grammatical concepts, model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs, and provide an account of semantic context effects in syntactic processing.

Abstract

Abstract Deriving representations of meaning has been a long-standing problem in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. The lack of a m odel for representing semantic and grammatical knowledge has been a handicap in attempting to model the effects of semantic constraints in hum an syntactic processing. A computational model of high-dim ensional context space, the Hyperspace A nalogue to Language (H AL), is presented with a series of simulations modelling a variety of human empirical results. HAL learns its representations from the unsupervised processing of 300 million words of conversational text. W e propose that HAL's high-dim ensional context space can be used to (1) provide a basic categorisation of semantic and grammatical concepts, (2) model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs, and (3) provide an account of semantic context effects in syntactic processing. W e propose that the distributed and contextually derived representations that HAL acquires provide a basis for the subconceptual knowledge that can be used in accounting for a diverse set of cognitive phenomena.