Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing

The concerns of psycholinguists will look very familiar to people engaged in CL research. A major area of investigation in psycholinguistics is determining how a listener uses frequency and other experience-based information during on-line sentence understanding. This book gives computationalists a distinguished guide to the current issues in the field. It is very clear that psycholinguistics has been influenced by recent work in CL, and is ripe for further cross-fertilization. Many of the papers recognize that more rigorous modeling is called for and that these models will require insights from computational linguistics. I will highlight some of the issues that shape current debates, with particular emphasis on areas of common interest between psycholinguistics and CL. The major source of data in the theory of httman sentence processing comes from the disambiguation of temporarily ambiguous sentences as in examples (1) and (2):