its model using cognitive semantics
Shun ISHIZAKI and Shigenori TANAKA (Mutumi IMAI)
Faculty of Environmental Information, Keio University
5322 Endoh Fujisawa 252, Japan
e-mail: ishizaki@sfc.keio.ac.jp
In this study, we adopt a process view of conversational process, according to which conversation is a two-way collaborative process, and the linguistic unit of conversation is not a sentence but a fragmentary and meaningful chunk. This study attempts to construct a "grammar" of ordinary language. We believe that the grammar should first and foremost satisfy the condition that we must be able to express freely without being bothered by the constraint of grammatical well-formedness. A communicative process normally involves repairs of different kinds, which makes the on-going sense-making process bumpy and fragmentary. The process of chaining, however, does not always go smoothly, and hence, requires modifications of communication track, including paraphrasing, reframing, and abandoning of a message. This results in a multi-layered structuring of information. With the framework as briefed as above, we attempted to identify the unit of chunk through analyzing conversational data (approximately 30,000 running-word data). We suggested that the unit of chunk be operationally defined on the basis of the three criteria: (1)structural(phrase or clause), (2)idiomatical(idioms or functional formulas) and (3)physical(pause) criteria. This concept "chunk" can be a unit for the semantic analysis of conversation data from the computational linguistic point of view. Traditional methods for semantic analysis, however, have not enough mechanism to treat with this kind of data. Traditional dictionaries have not enough structures for analyzing them. One of the major aims of our research is to build a computational model with a flexible mechanism for semantic analysis. For example, a metric space among concepts in a concept dictionary is introduced by using a cognitive psychological experiment (MDS method). By using another experiment (SD method), of which parameters are pairs of concepts expressing extreme meanings of state concepts such as big-small or fast-slow, a metric space of concepts for semantic analysis is introduced. We describe a basic discussions for the flexible semantic analysis using new researches mentioned above. The experiments are now being conducted so that their results will be described in detail at the next report.
Keywords: chunks, repairs, collaborative process, metric space, concept dictionary, experiments of cognitive psychology, semantic analysis