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ERIC Number: ED271971
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1986-May-2
Pages: 65
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Parallel Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences.
McClelland, James L.; Kawamoto, Alan H.
This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different from the conventional perspective found in computational linguistics. As a role-assignment model, it consists of two sets of units: one for representing the surface structure of the sentence and one for representing its case structure. Words are treated as patterns of activation; knowledge about them is stored in distributed form in the connections in a large network of simple neuron-like processing units. The model shows facility in dealing with such problems as frame selection, role assignment, and disambiguation, and it suggests a natural way to resolve unappealing aspects of the idea that there is a fixed set of individuated case roles. The simulation model is currently able to process only one-clause sentences, but extensions to multi-clause sentences are considered possible. (Author/MSE)
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA. Personnel and Training Research Programs Office.
Authoring Institution: Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA. Dept. of Psychology.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A