This landmark work in computational linguistics is of great importance both theoretically and practically because it shows that much of English grammar can be learned by a simple program.The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge investigates the central questions of human and machine cognition: How do people learn language? How can we get a machine to learn language? It first presents an explicit computational model of language acquisition which can actually learn rules of English syntax given a sequence of grammatical, but otherwise unprepared, sentences.It shows that natural languages are designed to be easily learned and easily processed-an exciting breakthrough from the point of view of artificial intelligence and the design of expert systems because it shows how extensive knowledge might be acquired automatically, without outside intervention. Computationally, the book demonstrates how constraints that may be reasonably assumed to aid sentence processing also aid language acquisition.Chapters in the book's second part apply computational methods to the general problem of developmental growth, particularly the thorny problem of the interaction between innate genetic endowment and environmental input, with the intent of uncovering the constraints on the acquisition of syntactic knowledge.
A number of "mini-theories" of learning are incorporated in this study of syntax with results that should appeal to a wide range of scholarly interests. These include how lexical categories, phonological rule systems, and phrase structure rules are learned; the role of semantic-syntactic interaction in language acquisition; how a "parameter setting" model may be formalized as a learning procedure; how multiple constraints (from syntax, thematic knowledge, or phrase structure) interact to aid acquisition; how transformational-type rules may be learned; and, the role of lexical ambiguity in language acquisition.Robert Berwick is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge is sixteenth in the Artificial Intelligence Series, edited by Patrick Winston and Michael Brady.
- ISBN10 0262268396
- ISBN13 9780262268394
- Publish Date 10 March 2015 (first published 14 August 1985)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher MIT Press Ltd
- Imprint MIT Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 350
- Language English