Roland Hausser Books

Building a talking robot necessitates a theory of natural language communication, while demonstrating this theory through a talking robot serves as a computational verification. The author presents an artificial cognitive agent with language as a software system called database semantics (DBS), focusing on a theoretical approach that avoids the complexities of hardware development. This allows for a comprehensive exploration of functions and data coverage in word recognition, syntactic-semantic interpretation, and inferencing, with procedural implementation to be addressed later. The author begins by examining the universals of natural language and introduces the Database Semantics approach. In Part I, key issues of natural language communication are explored, including the use of external surfaces, the communication cycle, memory structure, autonomous control, and learning. Part II delves into content coding, addressing semantic relations of structure, simultaneous content amalgamation, graph-theoretical considerations, and computing perspectives in dialogue and text. The book concludes with a final chapter, bibliography, and index, making it a valuable resource for researchers, graduate students, and engineers in artificial intelligence and robotics, particularly those focused on natural language processing.

Everyday life would be easier if we could simply talk with machines instead of having to program them. Before such talking robots can be built, however, there must be a theory of how communicating with natural language works. This requires not only a grammatical analysis of the language signs, but also a model of the cognitive agent, with interfaces for recognition and action, an internal database, and an algorithm for reading content in and out. In Database Semantics, these ingredients are used for reconstructing natural language communication as a mechanism for transferring content from the database of the speaker to the database of the hearer. Part I of this book presents a high-level description of an artificial agent which humans can freely communicate with in their accustomed language. Part II analyzes the major constructions of natural language, i. e., intra- and extrapropositional functor - argument structure, coordination, and coreference, in the speaker and the hearer mode. Part III defines declarative specifications for fragments of English, which are used for an implementation in Java. The book provides researchers, graduate students and software engineers with a functional framework for the theoretical analysis of natural language communication and for all practical applications of natural language processing.

The central task of future-oriented computational linguistics is the development of cognitive machines which humans can freely speak to in their natural language. This will involve the development of a functional theory of language, an objective method of verification, and a wide range of practical applications. Natural communication requires not only verbal processing, but also non-verbal perception and action. Therefore, the content of this book is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots with a focus on the mechanics of natural language communication in both the listener and the speaker.

The advent of computers has revolutionized the study of linguistics by enabling the processing of vast text quantities, enhancing empirical research. This technological shift allows for the practical application of grammatical theories and facilitates extensive testing of linguistic models, revealing both their strengths and weaknesses. The rise of personal workstations has made these advancements accessible, profoundly influencing linguistic theory development. The author’s experience underscores how computer tools have shaped the writing and refinement of this work, demonstrating their critical role in modern linguistics.

The study of linguistics has been forever changed by the advent of the computer. Not only does the machine permit the processing of enormous quantities of text thereby securing a better empirical foundation for conclusions-but also, since it is a modelling device, the machine allows the implementation of theories of grammar and other kinds of language processing. Models can have very unexpected properties both good and bad-and it is only through extensive tests that the value of a model can be properly assessed. The computer revolution has been going on for many years, and its importance for linguistics was recognized early on, but the more recent spread of personal workstations has made it a reality that can no longer be ignored by anyone in the subject. The present essay, in particular, could never have been written without the aid of the computer. I know personally from conversations and consultations with the author over many months how the book has changed. If he did not have at his command a powerful typesetting program, he would not have been able to see how his writing looked and exactly how it had to be revised and amplified. Even more significant for the evolution of the linguistic theory is the easy testing of examples made possible by the implementation of the parser and the computer-held lexicon. Indeed, the rule set and lexicon grew substantially after the successes of the early implementations created the desire to incorporate more linguistic phenomena.