A Cognitively Plausible Approach to Understanding Complex Syntax

Abstract

This paper describes a cognitively plausible mechanism for systematically handling complex syntactic constructions within a semantic parser. More specifically, we show how these constructions are handled without a global syntactic grammar or syntactic parse tree representations and without sacrificing the benefits of semantically-oriented parsing. We evaluate the psychological validity of our architecture and conclude that it is a plausible computational model of human processing for an important class of embedded clause constructions. As a result, we achieve robust sentence processing capabilities not found in other parsers of its class. Introduction People seem to understand syntactically complex sentences without noticeable effort. Consider, for example, the following sentences: (a) John asked Bill to eat the leftovers. (b) That's the gentleman that the woman invited to go to the show. (c) That's the gentleman that the woman declined to go to the show with. Recent experiments i...