<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P84-1092">
  <Title>From HOPE en I'ESPERANCE On the Role of Computational Neurolinguistics in Cross-Language Studies I</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="452" end_page="453" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3. PROCESSING ASSUMPTIONS IN HOPE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> HOPE is not an acronym but was chosen as the name of the system based on the legend of Pandora's box. While raising many questions of language within a new computational perspective, it provides a first attempt to answer them as well.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The system presents an initial attempt to integrate AI and brain theory, BT, on two levels, behaviorally and within processing. HOPE uses concepts from cellular neurophysiology to define its control. Information in HOPE is encoded in a hierarchical graph which permits extensive ambiquity.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> For complete detail of the model with examples in &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;lesioned&amp;quot; states the interested reader is referred to Gigley (1982a; 1982b; 1983a). We will only highlight the processing here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> HOPE stresses the process of natural language by incorporating a neurally plausible control that is internal to the processing mechanism. There is no external evaluation made to decide what happens next. At each process time interval, there are six types of serial-order process that can occur and affect the state of the process. The most important aspect of the control is that all of the serial order computations can occur simultaneously and affect any information that has been defined in the model.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Similar control philosophies have been employed in letter perception by McClelland and Rumelhart (1981), and in the connectionist theories applied to visual processing and language parsing (Ballard, 1982; Cottrell, 1983; Feldman, 1982; Small, Cottrell, and Shastri, 1982).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The major difference in the control in HOPE is that the control process can be &amp;quot;lesioned&amp;quot; by modifying parameter settings relative to their &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; settings to define hypothesized causes of pathological language behavior. Example &amp;quot;lesions&amp;quot; are changes in memory decay, elimination of a knowledge type, and slowing of processing relative to on-line word recognition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Studying the results of such &amp;quot;lesions&amp;quot; and their occurrence or not in pathological behavior is used to further understanding of the behavior and to suggest evolutionary changes in the model to better its approximation to language process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Information is presented at a phonological level as phonetic representations of words, at a word m~aning level as multiple pairs of designed syntactic category types and orthographic spelling associates, within grammar, and as a pragmatic interpretation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Each piece of information is a thresholding device with memory. It has an activity value, initially at a resting state, that is modified over time depending on the input, interconnections to other information, and an automatic activity decay scheme. In addition, the decay scheme is based on the state of the information, whether it has reached threshold and fired or not.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Activity is propagated in a fixed sense to all aspects of the meaning of words that are &amp;quot;connected&amp;quot; by spreading activation. (Collins and Loftus, 1975; Quillian, 1980/73; Small, Cottrell, and Shastri, 1982; Cottrell, 1983). Simultaneously, information interacts asynchronously due to threshold firing. This is achieved by the time coordination of asynchronously encoded serial order processes. The serial-order processes that occur at any moment of the process are context dependent; they depend on the &amp;quot;current state&amp;quot; of the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> The serial order processes include:  I. NEW-WORD-RECOGNITION: Introduction of the next phonetically recognized word in the sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> 2. DECAY: Automatic memory decay reduces the activity of all active information that does not receive additional input. It is an important part of the neural processes which occur during memory access.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> 3. REFRACTORY-STATE-ACTIVATION: An automatic change of state that occurs after active  information has reached threshold and fired.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> In this state the information can not affect or be affected by other information in the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14">  4. POST-REFRACTORY-STATE-ACTIVATION: An automatic change of state which all fired in- null formation enters after it has existed in the REFRACTORY-STATE. The decay rate is different than before firing.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="453" end_page="453" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5. MEANING-PROPAGATION: Fixed-time spreading
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> activation to the distributed parts of recognized words ' meanings.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="453" end_page="453" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
6. FIRING-INFORMATION-PROPAGATION: Asynchronous
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> activation propagation that occurs when information reaches threshold and fires. It can be INHIBITORY and EXCITATORY in its effect. INTERPRETATION is a result of activation of a pragmatic representation of a disambiguated word meaning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is the in interaction of the results of these asynchronous processes that the process of comprehension is defined.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The processes are independent of the knowledge representations defined and are blindly applied across all of them. This often produces unexpected but humanly interpretable results when the end state is compared with suitably defined behavioral test results.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> During processing, we can study both the change in state that results over time and &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; the change occurred. Analyzing both aspects of the process is the focus of comparison between &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;lesion&amp;quot; performance of the model. In this way we are able to study the effect of the &amp;quot;lesion&amp;quot; in a well defined linguistic context, and to make behavioral predictions that can be verified (Gigley, 1982b; 1983a; 1983b; Gigley and Duffy, 1982).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="453" end_page="454" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. FROM HOPE en I'ESPERANCE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Given that CN approaches to natural language processing assume a neural-like control paradigm, it is possible to assume that such a paradigm will work equally well for other natural languages by simply recoding the representations into the second language surface representation, grammar, and semantic structure. We assume that the processes can be tuned to produce &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; results as they have been for the simple English fragment demonstrated to date.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> As a first attempt to determine if such a cross-linguistic adaptation is possible, we have begun to redefine the knowledge representations to encode suitable representations of French, homologous to those that HOPE includes in its present level of implementation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The beginnings of the adaptation raised questions about language representation from a different perspective than occurs within a strictly linguistic analysis. The remainder of the paper focuses on our initial work in the adaptation (Gigley, 1984). As the research is currently underway, the discussion will raise several unanswered questions in pointing out the value of applying a CN methodology to cross-linguistic study.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In explaining the representation issues for French, we will first, briefly provide background in current linguistic research on French. This will include an overview of recent relevant psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies in French. Then we will present an overview of computational natural language systems for speech recognition comprehension and automatic translation into French. One issue, how to chunk French into a phonetic representation of words, along with the implications of the determined representation for our processing approach to comprehension of French, will form the basis of the discussion.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="453" end_page="454" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.1 Word Boundaries in On-Line Comprehension
of French
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Because of the parallel activation of all meanings of each recognized word in HOPE, the determination of the phonetic representation of a recognized word determines the breadth of active competition amon 9 meanings for subsequent time intervals of the process. Depending on how the words are chunked, different homophone sets, sets of associated meanings for a given homophone, may arise.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> For spoken English, word boundaries tend to be marked by intonation or pauses. However, for French this is not the case. Depending on the context, the ending of one word may be phonetically affixed to the following one called liason. In addition, when a content word begins wl~ vowel or silent h, the ending vowel of the preceding word is dropped, called elision.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The problem is particularly evident with respect to the use of articles which are very often spoken in such context. In addition, these same articles do not have the same meaning as they do in English. &amp;quot;Le, la, les&amp;quot; do not always mean &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; in the definite sense, but are often generic and mark masculine, feminine, or plural (Gross, 1977; Goffic and McBride, 1975). And furthermore, these same articles often are not translated into meaning preserving sentences in English. An example sentence demonstrating this is: Ce singe aime le cafe. (This monkey likes coffee.) The degradation of these same morphemes has also been associated with certain types of aphasic behavior in English speaking patients, specifically in agrammatics and Broca's aphasics.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> French neurolinguistic studies have documented a similar degradation in the ability of agrammatic and Broca's aphasics (LeCours and Lhermitte, 1969; Nespoulos, 1973; 1981; Segui, Mehler, Frauenfelder, and Morton, 1982; Tissot, Mounin, and Lhermitte, 1973). However, only the quantity of degradation is reported. The studies discuss performance in general and have not specifically addressed to what extent and in what ways these morphemes are affected as do some of the English studies (Zurif and Blumstein, 1978; Zurif, Green, Caramazza and Goodenough, 1976).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> Because of the import of articles in language processing, as briefly mentioned, how they are represented is of great interest when one wants to  use the adapted model, I'ESPERANCE, in its &amp;quot;lesioned&amp;quot; state to study the linguistic results. Finally, to further illustrate the problems encountered in determining the phonetic representation, examples of the implications of deciding to represent the word for water, &amp;quot;eau,&amp;quot; will be used. These implications are relevant to automatic speech recognition as well.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> The French equivalent for &amp;quot;some water&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;de l'eau&amp;quot; which includes the generic article, le, in an elision context. Water is spoken as l'eau even though there is another article as above. The question becomes should the phonetic representation be defined as &amp;quot;l'eau&amp;quot; or as the content word in isolation, &amp;quot;eau?&amp;quot; The decision affects the homophone set association and will affect the entire across-time processing in any defined model.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> Current descriptions of research in automatic speech recognition for French (Pierrel, 1982; Quinton, 1982) provide no relevant information.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> The MYRTILLE II system described by Pierrel (1982) stresses use of linguistic knowledge and includes phonological substitutions for the same word. The system includes alternatives for words at their junction with other words in different phonological contexts. The system described by Quinton (1982), on the other hand, is very HEARSAY-like and does not specifically address how these morphemes are handled.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="8"> Finally, the automatic translation work for French was consulted to see if there were any r~levant discussions included in the systems regarding the representations of words similar to &amp;quot;eau&amp;quot;. In Ariane-78, article constraints are affixed as features to content words and elision is decided in the final stage of the production of the French sentences (Boitet and Nedobejkine, 1981). The content words are specifically marked as beginning with vowels or silent &amp;quot;h&amp;quot;. The final stage of the process joins the marked content word with an appropriate article to produce output words such as l'eau. This suggests that for comprehension, one would first recognize the unit &amp;quot;l'eau&amp;quot; and decompose it to the article and content word with appropriate masculine/feminine indicators (Jayez, 1982).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="9"> Initial assessment of the literature with respect to this problem has provided little evidence. The role of articles has not been studied for French to the extent that it has for English.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="10"> Therefore, a pilot study with French aphasics was designed to analyze if and in what contexts these morphemes are affected.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="11"> The study includes off-line picture naming which forces use of articles in all of the above contexts, as well as on-line production of these morphemes in an attempt to determine in which way these morphemes are related to the words. Are they unified with the word in all instances or only in certain contexts? Adapting a neurolinguistically motivated CN model for a second language can be seen to motivate a different type of question with regard to the second language than occurs when one bases the studies on English surface phenomena. This is very important because often surface phenomena are assumed to be more similar than warranted. What we claim instead is that the processing is similar, indeed universal and that we must begin to make cross-linguistic studies that assume this underlying commonality and at the same time can account for the variation at the surface level.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>