Language cognition and language computation — human and machine language understanding

Abstract

Language understanding is the key scientific issue in cognitive science and computer science. However, the two disciplines are quite different in selecting specific research questions. Research in cognitive science focuses on analyzing the working mechanism of the brain and describing its response to language, while only a few research studies investigate the brain's language system as a whole. In contrast, computer scientists focus on the efficiency of practical applications when choosing research questions and often ignore essential laws of language. Thus, the research question becomes: “Can we combine these two disciplines to develop new insights into building intelligent language models and studying cognitive mechanisms?" This paper first reviews the research question, history, and methods of language understanding in cognitive science and computer science, focusing on the current research status and challenges. Then, it compares the commonalities and differences in language understanding between the two fields. Finally, it analyzes the existing work that combines the insights from language cognition and computation and prospects the future development trend.