Burghard B. Rieger:
In: Wang, Paul P. (ed.): JCIS-2000: Proceedings of the 5th Joint Conference on Information Sciences. Durham, NC. (Duke University) 2000, pp. 25 - 28
1. Based upon the conception of Computing with Words (CW), fuzzy and/or crisp granulation - once their process-result ambiguity is solved - lends itself easily to a unifying view of the way structural linguists used to and still categorize (segment and classify) observable natural language phenomena (tokens like phones, morphs, lexes, utterances , etc.) to constitute abstract linguistic entities (types like phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, sentences , etc.). These may either be derived as soft linguistic categories or fuzzy granules represented as vectors (fuzzy sets ), or they may be postulated as abstractions to form crisp categories representable by symbols (signs ) whose linear compositions in well-formed strings, in turn, give rise to the notion of correctness . Whereas the latter may formally be characterized by rules , the derivation of the former can only be determined procedurally by algorithms operating on language data.
2. Revising some traditional approaches to cognition in linguistics proper (LP), computational linguistics (CL), and artificial intelligence (AI), this line of semiotic analysis and description of natural language processing will be introduced to advance our understanding of how natural languages' sign systems function the way they do, and how this functioning may be modeled under theoretically motivated assumptions and/or empirically testable hypotheses derived thereof. Other than competence oriented linguistics which considers the speakers' own introspective assessment and judgment of language faculty, its linguistic functions, and the correctness of singular sentences or sentence structures sufficient, the idealizations resulting from a purportedly immediate access to cognitively relevant entities can be shown to be insufficient. Therefore, procedural modeling of functional sign constitution does not abstract from the dynamics which SCIP-systems are based upon. Instead, it will be shown and exemplified that the traces of such processing can be identified and exploited to reconstruct fuzzy information granulation systematically.
3. In fuzzy linguistic (FL) models of computational semiotic (CS) processes, analytical procedures are derived detecting and, at the same time, operating on intrinsic (or structural) information that constitutes the phenomena concerned. Based upon the assumption that the structuredness of natural language discourse, its organizing function, i.e. integration of parts into wholes (sign formation), as well as the causative functions, i.e. association of causes with effects (meaning constitution), is realized in corpora of pragmatically homogeneous texts, these may be analyzed for inherent regularities which may be explored in order to re-construct (crisp and fuzzy) semantic granules. Tied to the empirically well founded and testable observations and rigorous mathematical description of results, entity formation in natural language discourse can be shown to constitute (different levels of) processes and/or their representational results. On word level these are viewed as enactment of universal principles which are realized in and detectable from pragmatically homogeneous texts of either performed or intended communicative interaction in actual situations.
4. Such a performance oriented approach allows to reconstruct formally and model procedurally both, the significance of entities and the meanings of signs as a function of a first and second order semiotic embedding relation of language games (or cotexts) and of situations (or contexts). This function corresponds to the two-level actualization of cognitive processes in language understanding, enabling intermediate representational (tree-graph) structures to be derived. Their property of situational (co- and contextual) sensitivity gives rise to a diagrammatical emulation of (perspective and relevance driven) semantic inferencing that operates on them. Some examples of shallow reasoning processes on concepts as constituted in very large corpora of (English and German) newspaper texts will be given to illustrate the algorithms operational profile and performance.
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