Meaning and Discourse - A Computer Model of Psychoanalytic Speech and Cognition

Clippinger's book on discourse is aimed at linguists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, and in 100,000 words, almost totally devoid of humor, he takes on Freud, Piaget, Bateson, Colby, and Schank; he offers homage to HACKER and kudos to CONNIVER; he ignores both linguistics and AI work in natural-language generation; he invents a grammar of English; he performs validation tests on a hand-simulated program; and he closes by warning us about ignoring the social impact of computers in the future. All of this is background to a program that models one, halting paragraph of speech by a depressed patient whose request to change the form in which she pays her therapist is, we are told in great detail, a desire for intercourse.