New Mexico State University's Computing Research Laboratory

The Connectionism and Natural Language Processing Group has several main research directions that are apparent from the projects listed here. Our main approach is an outgrowth of preference semantics, where language understanding is semantic and knowledge based as opposed to syntax based. We have a strong interest in the connectionist approach to natural language processing and focus on the limitations of this approach. We have several projects in alternative parsing mechanisms, the traditional serial approaches, and coarseand finegrained parallelism. We also have dual efforts in the modeling of beliefs and points of view and have begun work on the use of a machine-readable dictionary (Longman's) in the automatic construction of lexicons. Finally, we have a substantial project in multilingual machine translation, primarily using Xiuming Huang's XTRA as a main front end. XTRA is based on a semantic definite-clause grammar written in Prolog, and its distinctive features are its treatment of conjunctions, phrase and clause attachment procedures (Wilks, Huang, and Fass 1985), and relaxation procedures for semantic constraints. Currently, we are improving XTRA's Chinese output as well as developing trial systems for Spanish, Japanese, and German.