Chapter 1 - Word Expert Parsing Revisited in a Cognitive Science Perspective

Abstract

This chapter discusses word expert parsing from the perspective of cognitive science. It additionally describes the general principles, representations and implementation of a computational model of natural language understanding—the Word Expert Parser—that attaches great importance to lexical ambiguity resolution. The chapter also discusses its flaws and merits as a model to understand human language. The greatest flaws are: (1) the absence of an implemented large-scale semantic network, (2) the absence of important psychological concept of spreading activation within that kind of network, (3)the impreciseness of the relationship between the time course of its operations, and (4) impreciseness of human language processing along with absence of true parallelism. The model has a number of merits as well: (1) its stress on the lexicon fits in with the general lexicalist approach in linguistics, (2) implements interactive view of language processing, (3) it works in accordance with a number of important results in psycho- and neurolinguistics, and (4) it yields interesting predictions about normal and aphasic behavior. These features make the model a valuable computational tool for cognitive science research in human natural language understanding.