Skip to main content

A Computational Model of Recovery

  • Chapter
Reanalysis in Sentence Processing

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 21))

  • 196 Accesses

Abstract

This paper introduces a computational model of recovery in sentence processing. The model consists of a general computational framework which defines a space of possible models and a set of heuristics which constrain the framework to a specific model. The basic idea is to diagnose the error source that has caused the failure and to repair the structure in order to solve the inconsistencies. The diagnosis of the error is accomplished through a heuristic search procedure (which makes selected accesses to the syntactic structure and returns the last safe position) operating together with a constraint on possible structural repairs. The repair component reprocesses input items only when it is not possible to reuse the structures built during the first pass analysis. This chapter describes the architecture of the general framework and the component modules, and sketches some heuristics that explain well-known cases of reanalysis in the literature.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Abney, S.P. 1989. A computational model of human parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 129–144.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bader, M. and Lasser, I. 1994. German verb-final clauses and sentence processing: evidence for the immediate attachment. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, and K. Rayner (eds.), Perspectives on Sentence Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 225–242.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bever, T. 1970. The cognitive bias for linguistic structures. In J. Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 279–352.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blank, G.D. 1989. A finite and real-time processor for natural language. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 32, 10, 1174–1189.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Vincenzi, M. and Job, R. 1993. Some observations on the universality of the Late-Closure strategy. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 2, 189–206.

    Google Scholar 

  • Earley, J. 1970. An efficient context-free parsing algorithm. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 13, 94–102.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eberhard, K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Sedivy, J., and Tanenhaus, M. 1995. Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 409–436.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferreira, F. and Henderson, J. 1991. Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 725–745.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J.D. and Inoue, A. 1994. The diagnosis and cure of garden paths. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 5, 407–434.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ford, M., Bresnan, J., and Kaplan, R. 1982. A competence-based theory of syntactic closure. In J. Bresnan (ed.), The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 727–796.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, L. 1987. Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 5, 519–559.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, L. and Fodor, J.D. 1978. The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291–325.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, L. and Rayner, K. 1982. Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, E.A.F. 1991. A Computational Theory of Human Linguistic Processing: Memory Limitations and Processing Breakdown. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Available as Center for Machine Translation Technical Report CMU-CMT-91–125.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, E.A.F., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-González, E., and Hickok, G. 1996. Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition, 59, 23–59.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gorrell, P. 1995. Syntax and Parsing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hobbs, J.R. and Bear, J. 1990. Two principles of parsing preferences. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 90), Helsinki, 162–167.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hudson, R. 1990. English Word Grammar. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huyck, C.R. and Lytinen, S.L. 1993. Efficient heuristic natural language parsing. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligente (AAAI 93), 386–391.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, R. 1977. X-bar Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Just, M.A. and Carpenter, P.A. 1992. A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 1, 122–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kay, M. 1980. Algorithm Schemata and Data Structures in Syntactic Processing. Technical Report No. CSL-80–12. Xerox Park, Palo Alto, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kimball, J.P. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 2, 15–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lesmo, L. and Lombardo, V. 1995. Efficient Dependency Parsing. Technical Report No. 13–95. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, R.L. 1993. An Architecturally-based Theory of Human Sentence Comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Available as Technical Report CMU-CS-93–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lombardo, V. 1995a. Parsing and recovery. In Proceedings of the I7th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 648–653.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lombardo, V. I995b. Splitting the use of syntax and lexicon in incremental processing. Paper presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference 1995,Edinburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lombardo, V. and Lesmo, L. 1996. An Earley-type recognizer for dependency grammar. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 96), 723–728.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, M., Pearmmutter, N., and Seidenberg, M. 1994. Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 4, 676–703.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, M. 1980. A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, M., Hindle, D., and Fleck, M. 1983. D-Theory: Talking about talking about trees. Association for Computational Linguistics, 21, 129–136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McRoy, S. W. and Hirst, G. 1990. Race-based parsing and syntactic disambiguation. Cognitive Science, 14, 313–353.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mel’cuk, I. 1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milne, R. 1982. Predicting garden path sentences. Cognitive Science, 6, 349–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Newell, A. 1990. Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perlmutter, D. 1983. Studies in Relational Grammar 1. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pickering, M. J. 1994. Processing local and unbounded dependencies: A Unified Account. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 4, 323–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pickering, M.J. and Barry, G. 1991. Sentence processing without empty categories. Language and Cognitive Processes, 6, 229–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pritchett, B. 1992. Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sgall, P., Haijcova, E., and Panevova, J. 1986. The Meaning of Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. Dordrecht: Dordrecht Reidel Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shieber, S.M. 1983. Sentence disambiguation by a shift-reduce parsing technique. Association for Computational Linguistics, 21, 113–118

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spivey-Knowlton, M. and Sedivy, J. C. 1995. Resolving attachment ambiguity with multiple constraints. Cognition, 55, 3, 227–267.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spivey-Knowlton, M., Trueswell, J., and Tanenhaus, M. 1993. Contexts effects in syntactic ambiguity resolution: Discourse and semantic influences in parsing reduced relative clauses. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psycology, 47, 2, 276–309.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stevenson, S. 1993. A competition-based explanation of syntactic attachment preferences and garden path phenomena. Association for Computational Linguistics, 31, 266–273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stevenson, S. 1994. A unified model of preference and recovery mechanisms in human parsing. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 824–829.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sturt, P. and Crocker, M. 1995. Incrementality and monotonicity in syntactic processing. In D. Milward and P. Sturt (ed.), Incremental Interpretation. Edinburgh Working Papers in Cognitive Science, Vol. 11. Edinburgh: Centre for Cognitive Science, 23–66.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sturt, P. and Crocker, M. 1996. Monotonic syntactic processing: a cross-linguistic study of attachment and reanalysis. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 15, 449–494.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tomita, M. 1987. An efficient augmented-context-free parsing algorithm. Computational Linguistics, 13, 31–46.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trueswell, J., Tanenhaus, M., and Garnsey, S.M. 1994. Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 285–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weinberg, A. 1993. Parameters in the theory of sentence processing: Minimal commitment theory goes east. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 3, 339–364

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Lombardo, V. (1998). A Computational Model of Recovery. In: Fodor, J.D., Ferreira, F. (eds) Reanalysis in Sentence Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9070-9_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9070-9_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5037-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9070-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics