Sheldon Klein

A Computational Approach to Grammatical Coding of English Words

As a firs l~ step in many computer language processing systems, each word in a natural language sentence must be coded as to its form-class or part of speech. This paper describes a computational grammar coder which has been completely programmed and is oper~tional on Lhe IBM 7090. It is part of a complete syntactic annlysis system for which it accomplishes word-class coding, using a computational approach rather than the usual method of dictionary lookup. The resulting system is completely contained in less than 1~,000 computer words. It processes running English text on the IBM 7090 at a rate of more than 1250 words per minute. Since the system is not dependent on large dictionaries, it operates on any ordinary English text. In preliminary experiments with scientific text, the system correctly and unambiguously coded over 90 percent of the words in two samples of scientific writing. A fair proportion of the remaining ambiguity can be removed at higher levels of synvactic analysis, but the problem of structural ambiguity in natural languages is seen to be a critical one in the development of practical language processing systems.

Language, Communication, Chimpanzees [and Comments and Reply]

In the last ten years, entirely new experiments have been undertaken in the field of animal communication. The works of Allen and Beatrice Gardner with the chimpanzee Washoe and David and Ann Premack with Sarah should have held the attention of linguists and semiologists more than they have up to now. It is from this standpoint that they are examined here.

Analogy and Mysticism and the Structure of Culture [and Comments and Reply]

Examples are drawn from the cultures of China, Africa, Tibet and Japan, and the Navaho in support of a model for human cognitive processing which assumes that a major component of the rules for calculating human behavior is resident outside the individual in the symbolic artifacts of culture. An Appositional Transformation Operator (ATO) is specified that can relate semantic concepts and patterns of behavior by analogy. The ATO is shown to work with great computational efficiency for verbal and visual analogies. The I Ching, a philosophical divination mechanism of classical Chinese culture, is shown to be constructed on the basis of an ATO logic. The existence of such an ATO divination system throughout much of Africa is also discussed, as well as the apparent encoding of ATO structures in the iconic imagery of Buddhism and of Navaho sand painting. This analysis is intended as part of a cross-cultural validation of a theory which posits that ATOs are the basis for human calculation of behavior by analogy and for perception and use of metaphor.

Meta-compiling text grammars as a model for human behavior

In our efforts to model the totality of synchronic and diachronic language behavior in complex social groups, we developed a meta-symbolic simulation system that includes a powerful behavioral simulation programming language that models, generates and manipulates events in the notation of a semantic network that changes through time, and a generalized, semantics-to-surface structure generation mechanism that can describe changes in the semantic universe in the syntax of any natural language for which a grammar is supplied. Because the system is a meta-theoretical device, it can handle generative semantic grammars formulated within a variety of theoretical frameworks.

Some components of a program for dynamic modelling of historical change in language

A system that is to serve as a vehicle for testing models of language change is being programmed in JOVIAL. Inherent in the design of the system is the requirement that each member of a speech community be represented by a generation grammar and a recognition grammar. The units of interaction in a simulation are conversations. Grammar rules may be borrowed or lost by individuals during the course of a simulation. The rules themselves need not be limited to those suggested by a particular theory of language; also, they may refer to any or all levels of linguistic phenomena. Extralinguistic factors pertinent to language change may be incorporated in simulations.

Autoling: an automated linguistic fieldworker

A system intended to act as a linguistic fieldworker via teletype interaction with a linguistically unsophisticated informant has been designed and is being programmed in extended ALGOL for the Burroughs 5500 and 8500 computers.The system consists of the three major analytic components ; a program for performing morphological analyses and deriving a segmentation algorithm for sentences in any language ; a syntactic learning program that formulates context free and context sensitive phrase structure rules (monolingual learning component to be added later) ; and a machine translation program that learns to translate in both directions between the query language (English) and the language of the live informant via bi-lingual transformations.