THE AUTHOR RECOUNTS THE RISE IN IMPORTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION, WHICH TOGETHER WITH LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING COMPRISE THE MAJOR FIELDS OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS. MUCH OF THE RECENT THEORETICAL WORK ON LANGUAGE DEALS WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SURFACE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE AND THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE. THE…

Computational linguistics, as linguistics in general, is the study of human behavior. (MF)

RESEARCH IN THREE AREAS OF COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS IS DESCRIBED--(1) THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR FOR A SUBSET TO GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES IN ENGLISH, (2) THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THIS GRAMMAR IN TERMS OF A SENTENCE SYNTHESIZING PROGRAM WRITTEN IN LISP 1.5, AND (3) THE USE OF SENTENCE SYNTHESIZING PROGRAMS FOR…

At present a computer system cannot be constructed for handling the totality of a natural language in any significant way. It is, however, possible to construct a system for communication in a narrow field of discourse. A working model for a specialized discourse based on a recognition grammar is discussed. Some properties of the recognition…

Parts of this paper were presented in the form of a lecture at Florida State University, Tallahassee, on February 19, 1970. Section 8 was originally delivered as an informal seminar at the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, on March 12, 1970. (VM)

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…

The first section of this paper deals with the attempts within the framework of transformational grammar to make semantics a systematic part of linguistic description, and outlines the characteristics of the generative semantics position. The second section takes a critical look at generative semantics in its later manifestations, and makes a case…

THIS PAPER IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES PRESENTING THE FEATURES OF SYSTEMS DESIGNED FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AT THE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH CENTER (LRC) OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. ONGOING RESEARCH IS EXPANDING THE APPLICATION OF THESE SYSTEMS TO INCLUDE NOT ONLY NATURAL LANGUAGE BUT PROGRAMING LANGUAGES AS WELL. THIS PAPER DISCUSSES…

This report documents efforts over a five-month period toward completion of a pilot system for machine translation of German scientific and technical literature into English. The report is divided into three areas: grammar formalism, programming, and linguistics. Work on grammar formalism concentrated mainly on increasing the power of the…

This review of Bever's psycholinguistics survey is for the most part favorable. Commentary is centered on sections 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the report. The survey's first part is judged significant in that Wundt's pioneering work in psycholinguistics is discussed. The second section, on grammar as a psychological process, is found obscure in its…

This paper defines the structure of a semantic network for use in representing discourse and lexical meanings. The structure is designed to represent underlying semantic meanings that, with a lexicon and a grammar, can generate natural-language sentences in a linguistically justifiable manner. The semantics of natural English can be defined as a…

The objective of this thesis was to colligate the various strands of research in the literature of computational linguistics that have to do with the computational treatment of semantic content so as to encode it into a computerized dictionary. In chapter 1 the course of mechanical translation (1947-1960) and quantitative linguistics is traced to…

Two accomplishments have increased the feasibility of taking preparatory steps for the construction of machine intelligence systems which can acquire knowledge about facts or descriptions of facts through man-machine dialogue in the user's natural language. One is a better understanding of the relationship between perception, language, and…

This paper describes the notation and underlying organization of an augmented, recursive-transition network grammar and illustrates how such a grammar is a natural medium for expressing and explaining a wide variety of facts about the psychological processes of sentence comprehension. A general discussion of transformational grammar and…

There is a need for a new kind of linguistic theory which, while being concerned with both generation and analysis, must include the roles of memory, non-linguistic knowledge, and inference. The role of logic is diminished according to such a theory because inference has no real logical content. Meaning must be studied with respect to the actual…