An in-progress interdisciplinary research effort, Conversation Analytic (CA) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study, is reported. A conversation analytic approach to repair and self-explication is taken that covers both human studies and artificial intelligence. The term "human" is used here in place of "linguistic." Three…

An obstacle in Natural Language understanding is the existence of lexical gaps, i.e. words or word senses that are not in the lexicon of the system. This thesis describes the implementation of MURRAY, a learning mechanism which infers the properties of a new lexical item from its syntactical environment and infers its meaning based on context and…

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…

Accurate communication of empathy by a counselor may facilitate client self-exploration which, in turn, is necessary for positive outcome. To study the effects of counselor empathic response on client self-exploration, two doctoral level counseling psychology students had one 45-minute interview with each of two college student clients. Counselors…

To discover the truth about the extent of children's reading vocabularies, a project was undertaken at the Falk Laboratory School, University of Pittsburgh, to determine how many words first, second, and third grade children could recognize in print. A team of graduate students tabulated the words appearing in commonly used basal materials and in…

Part of a larger investigation of the rhetorical character of the presidencies of Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, this report concentrates on the presidents' linguistic styles and their semantic choices. The first half of the report discusses the background of the study and the development of a computerized language analysis…

Describing cognitive science as a new discipline based upon the integration of elements of psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and education, this paper argues that such a discipline has important implications for the field of communication. Following an overview of the literature of cognitive science, the paper offers an…

THE INVESTIGATION IS CONCERNED WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATIC INDEXING, ABSTRACTING, AND EXTRACTING SYSTEMS. BASIC INVESTIGATIONS IN ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY, PHONETICS, AND SYNTAX ARE PURSUED AS NECESSARY MEANS TO THIS END. IN THE FIRST SECTION THE THEORY AND DESIGN OF THE "SENTENCE DICTIONARY" EXPERIMENT IN AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION IS OUTLINED. SOME OF…

To ascertain what the most common or basic syllables were, 5,000 of the most frequent words (derived from the American Heritage List) were syllabicated graphemically. In the resulting computer assembled inventory, 3,402 separate or distinct syllables had frequencies of occurrence ranging from 1 to 230. Monosyllabic and two-syllable words each…

This article provides a tutorial introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for those involved in Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). The general theme is that much of the current work in AI, particularly in the areas of natural language understanding systems, rule induction, programming languages, and socratic systems, has important…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

This report is the third in a series of annual reports describing the research performed by Stanford Research Institute to provide the technology that will allow speech understanding systems to be designed and implemented for a variety of different task domains and environmental constraints. The current work is being carried out cooperatively with…

As part of a continuing project of language analysis, SURC presents an essay on the nature and history of frequency counts. The first section deals with the history of such counts and traces them from Early Hellenic times to the present. Section 2 is an analysis of techniques used and describes the capabilities and limitations of frequency counts…

Using frequency, range, availability, and coverage as objectively weighted indices of utility in the development of a basic French vocabulary list, the authors describe the technical procedure used in this study and list the resultant first 153 words according to the four indices and the utility rating. Weighting factors for each index, based on…

Some of the assertions made by Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" are considered. In particular, the notion of a "competence" model in linguistics is criticized. Formal postulates for a conceptually-based linguistic theory are presented. (Author/JD)