ENRICHING LINGUISTICS WITH STATISTICS: PERFORMANCE MODELS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam
1995/148 pp.
90-74795-36-6/Pb
Academische Pers, Amsterdam
A number of copies of this book, which originally appeared as a doctoral
dissertation, is available at cost price (about $10). Please contact:
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam,
Plantage Muidergracht 24, NL-1018 TV Amsterdam, phone: +31 20 5256090,
e-mail: illc@fwi.uva.nl
ABSTRACT
The book starts by motivating a statistical approach to linguistics from
both a cognitive and an engineering point of view, and pursues with the
problem of what should be demanded from a statistical enrichment of a
given linguistic theory. It then argues for a linguistic performance
model which employs a very large language corpus, that stands for a
person's past language experience, in which each sentence is annotated
with the (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) analysis that seemed most
appropriate for understanding the sentence in the context in which it was
uttered. An analysis of a new sentence can be constructed out of
combinations of partial analyses that occur in the corpus. By combining
the relative frequencies of these partial analyses, the model is able to
select from all possible analyses of a sentence the analysis which is
actually perceived by a person. The book deals with six different
realizations of performance models, that allow for the use of currently
available corpora, and goes into their formal, computational and
experimental aspects.
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