CompCog: The edge of the lexicon: Productive knowledge and direct experience in the acquisition and processing of multiword expressions

CompCog：词典的边缘：获取和处理多词表达的富有成效的知识和直接经验

• 批准号: 1551866
• 负责人: Roger Levy
• 金额: $ 32.92万
• 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: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-08-15 至 2021-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1551866&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CompCog; edge; lexicon; Productive; knowledge

Language is the most discrete, measurable cultural record of the human mind, and is uniquely expressive among the communicative systems found in nature. Every day we comprehend hundreds of sentences that we hear or read but have never encountered before, and we produce hundreds more. Yet our success at these many acts of communication belies the difficulty of the task: language is rife with ambiguity, our attention is limited, our environments may be noisy, and we often have incomplete information about the shared knowledge and beliefs of the people we engage with. This ability, unique to our species, poses profound challenges for our scientific understanding of the capabilities of the human mind. Deepening our understanding of these capabilities requires a combination of ideas and methods from linguistics, psychology, and computer science. Advances in this area help lay the groundwork for improvements in natural language technologies such as document summarization, paraphrasing, question answering, and machine translation, and in better identification, diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders.Within this broader research enterprise, this project focuses on the "edge of the lexicon", elucidating the conditions under which a linguistic expression begins to get stored in the mind of the native speaker who uses it, and the consequences of the expression being stored as a holistic unit. Native speakers know both productive rules that license and allow interpretation of phrases and sentences that they have never before encountered and a rich inventory of lexical items that can be combined through these productive rules. Many of these lexical items are individual words, but there is evidence that specific, frequent multi-word expressions, such as "meat and potatoes" or "large majority" may also get stored in the lexicon. This project combines artificial intelligence-based computational models, large linguistic datasets, and controlled psychological experimentation to explore the edge of the lexicon, probing how direct experience with specific multi-word expressions leads to their being stored in one's mental lexicon, how such storage is reconciled with productive knowledge in language comprehension and production, and how these expressions emerge and change over time.

语言是人类思维中最离散、最可测量的文化记录，在自然界中发现的交流系统中具有独特的表达能力。每天我们都会理解数百个我们听到或读到但以前从未遇到过的句子，并且我们还会产生数百个句子。然而，我们在许多沟通行为上的成功掩盖了任务的困难：语言充满歧义，我们的注意力有限，我们的环境可能很吵闹，而且我们经常掌握与我们交往的人的共享知识和信仰不完整的信息和。这种能力是我们人类所独有的，它对我们对人类思维能力的科学理解提出了深刻的挑战。 加深我们对这些能力的理解需要结合语言学、心理学和计算机科学的思想和方法。该领域的进展有助于为文档摘要、释义、问答和机器翻译等自然语言技术的改进以及更好地识别、诊断和治疗语言障碍奠定基础。在这个更广泛的研究事业中，该项目的重点是在“词典的边缘”，阐明语言表达开始存储在使用该语言的母语者的头脑中的条件，以及该表达作为整体单元存储的后果。以母语为母语的人既知道许可并允许解释他们以前从未遇到过的短语和句子的生产性规则，也知道可以通过这些生产性规则组合的丰富的词汇项目。这些词汇项目中有许多是单个单词，但有证据表明特定的、频繁的多词表达，例如“meat andpotatos”或“majormost”也可能存储在词典中。该项目结合基于人工智能的计算模型、大型语言数据集和受控心理实验来探索词典的边缘，探讨特定多词表达的直接经验如何导致它们被存储在一个人的心理词典中，这种存储是如何进行的与语言理解和生产方面的生产性知识相协调，以及这些表达方式如何随着时间的推移而出现和变化。