Foundations of Natural Language Grammar

Grammar-based Natural Language Understanding

This chapter describes the grammar-based natural language understanding (NLU) component of the OVIS system. The NLU component receives its input from the speech recognizer and passes the result of linguistic analysis on to the pragmatic interpretation component. The output of the speech recognizer is a word graph, which represents all different hypotheses for the spoken input from the user. Lin...

Précis of Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution.

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that ever...

Variational Bayesian Grammar Induction for Natural Language

This paper presents a new grammar induction algorithm for probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs). There is an approach to PCFG induction that is based on parameter estimation. Following this approach, we apply the variational Bayes to PCFGs. The variational Bayes (VB) is an approximation of Bayesian learning. It has been empirically shown that VB is less likely to cause overfitting. Moreov...

Unsupervised Grammar Inference Systems for Natural Language

In recent years there have been significant advances in the field of Unsupervised Grammar Inference (UGI) for Natural Languages such as English or Dutch. This paper presents a broad range of UGI implementations, where we can begin to see how the theory has been put in to practise. Several mature systems are emerging, built using complex models and capable of deriving natural language grammatica...

COGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS of GRAMMAR