From nobody@cs.Buffalo.EDU Tue May 26 14:52 EDT 1998
From: nobody@cs.Buffalo.EDU
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 14:52:04 -0400 (EDT)
To: techreps@cs.Buffalo.EDU
Subject: techrep: UPDATE request
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### Begin Citation ### Do not delete this line ###
%U FF.ps
%A Rapaport, William J.
%A Ehrlich, Karen
%T A Computational Theory of Vocabulary Acquisition
%R 98-05
%D April 14, 1998
%I Department of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo
%K computational linguistics, vocabulary acquisition, machine learning
%X As part of an interdisciplinary project to develop a computational  
cognitive model of a reader of narrative text, we are developing a  
computational theory of how natural-language-understanding systems can  
automatically acquire new vocabulary by determining from context  the  
meaning of words that are unknown, misunderstood, or used in a new  
sense.  `Context' includes surrounding text, grammatical information,  
and background knowledge, but no external sources.  Our thesis is that  
the meaning of such a word  *can* be determined from context, can be  
*revised* upon further encounters with the word, ``*converges*'' to a  
dictionary-like definition if enough context has been provided and  
there have been enough exposures to the word, and eventually ``*settles  
down*'' to a ``steady state'' that is always subject to revision upon  
further encounters with the word.  The system is being implemented in  
the SNePS knowledge-representation and reasoning system.  
This essay is forthcoming as a chapter in Iwanska, Lucja, & Shapiro,  
Stuart C. (1999), _Natural Language Processing and Knowledge  
Representation: Language for Knowledge and Knowledge for Language_  
(Menlo Park, CA/Cambridge, MA:  AAAI Press/MIT Press).