Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating cognitive and communicative pressures on natural language lexicons

博士论文研究：调查自然语言词典的认知和交际压力

• 批准号: 1451173
• 负责人: Edward Gibson
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-15 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451173&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Investigating; cognitive

Understanding how humans produce and comprehend language is a critical step in understanding high-level human cognition and the human brain more generally. Moreover, basic research into human language has been, and will continue to be, useful for building computational natural language processing systems that enable humans to interact naturally with computers. The lexicons of the world's thousands of languages--that is, the sets of words that exist in any given language--offer a particularly rich source of insight into the language production and comprehension mechanism. The words of any given language have undergone thousands of years of evolution, sometimes changing dramatically over one or two generations as sounds change, new words are invented or borrowed from other languages, and old words die. What all languages have in common, however, is that they enable their speakers to successfully communicate with one another. Therefore, a language's lexicon is necessarily constrained by the cognitive and communicative demands of speakers. Consequently, studying the statistical properties of lexicons, the ways that lexicons evolve, and the process by which words are formed is a promising avenue for answering fundamental questions about human cognition.Building on previous work by this research group showing that lexicons tend to be structured for efficient communication, this research will harness the power of large cross-linguistic data sets available through the Internet, including Wikipedia and Google Books, in order to study the lexicons of a large number of world languages (~100). Specifically, this analysis will focus on how words cluster or spread out in phonetic space, exploring competing demands for words to consist of easy-to-pronounce and easy-to-comprehend sequences but also to be phonetically distinct from one another. A second major component of this work is a series of human-participant behavioral experiments that, in a controlled laboratory setting and in a smaller number of languages, explore the mechanisms that underlie how words change over time. Finally, a computational model will be used to integrate the insights of the statistical analyses and behavioral experiments in order to explore and predict how words enter and exit the lexicon over time. This research program has implications not just for higher-level human cognition but for any engineering applications that require human-computer interaction involving natural language and also for any applications that require building a cognitively tractable communication system that allows people to communicate efficiently.

了解人类如何产生和理解语言是理解人类高级认知和更广泛的人类大脑的关键一步。此外，对人类语言的基础研究已经并将继续有助于构建计算自然语言处理系统，使人类能够与计算机自然交互。世界上数千种语言的词典（即任何给定语言中存在的单词集）为深入了解语言产生和理解机制提供了特别丰富的来源。任何特定语言的单词都经历了数千年的演变，有时随着声音的变化、新单词的发明或从其他语言借用以及旧单词的消失，在一两代人的时间内就会发生巨大的变化。然而，所有语言的共同点是它们使使用者能够成功地相互交流。因此，语言的词汇必然受到说话者的认知和交际需求的限制。因此，研究词典的统计特性、词典演变的方式以及单词形成的过程是回答有关人类认知的基本问题的一个有前途的途径。该研究小组之前的工作表明，词典往往是结构化的为了实现高效沟通，这项研究将利用互联网上提供的大型跨语言数据集（包括维基百科和谷歌图书）的力量来研究大量世界语言的词典（~100）。具体来说，这一分析将重点关注单词如何在语音空间中聚集或扩散，探索对单词的竞争需求，即由易于发音和易于理解的序列组成，但又在语音上彼此不同。这项工作的第二个主要组成部分是一系列人类参与者的行为实验，在受控的实验室环境中和较少数量的语言中，探索词语随时间变化的机制。最后，将使用计算模型来整合统计分析和行为实验的见解，以探索和预测单词如何随着时间的推移进入和退出词典。该研究项目不仅对更高层次的人类认知具有影响，而且对任何需要涉及自然语言的人机交互的工程应用，以及任何需要构建认知上易于处理的通信系统以允许人们有效通信的应用都有影响。