Burghard B. Rieger:
From Computational Linguistics to Computing with Words
In: Willée, G. / Schröder, B. / Schmitz, H.C. (Hrsg.):
Computerlinguistik - Was geht, was kommt? Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von
Winfried Lenders. Sankt Augustin (Gardez) 2003, pp. 230-234
Abstract
For the past decades, the concept of symbolic representation together with
the computer metaphor appeared to offer an adequate framework to deal with
cognitive processes scientifically. Formally grounded by logical calculi and
implemented as algorithms operating on representational structures, cognition
is considered a form of information processing in the cognitive sciences.
Thus, computational linguistics (CL) as part of cognitive theory
identified the complex of language understanding as a modular system of
subsystems of information processing which could be modeled accordingly.
The alliance of logics and linguistics, mediated mainly by (language)
philosophy in the past, and by (discrete) mathematics since the first
half of the last century, has long been (and partly still is) dominating
in what way and terms natural languages and their functioning should be
explicated and how their processing could be modeled. In replicating (and
in parts also supplementing) semiotically motivated strata of systematic
sign description and analysis, different levels of modular aggregation of
information - external and/or internal to a processing system - have been
distinguished in cognitive models of language understanding. They partly
correspond to and partly cut across the syntactics-semantics-pragmatics
distinction in the semiotic relatedness of signs, the
utterance-discourse-corpus levels of performative language
analysis, and the hierarchy of morpho-phonological,
syntax-sentencial and lexico-semantic descriptions in
structural models of linguistics. It is ironic, however, that the
dramatic increase of computational power and symbol manipulation means has
changed the fundamentals of many scientific disciplines, creating even new
ones, but has left linguistically oriented disciplines, even new ones,
adhere to the lore of seemingly well grounded and traditionally dignified
concepts in describing natural language structures and their functions.
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