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Title:
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Complexity of Human Language Comprehension |
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Author:
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Ristad, Eric Sven |
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Issue Date:
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1988-12-01 |
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Abstract:
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The goal of this article is to reveal the computational structure of modern principle-and-parameter (Chomskian) linguistic theories: what computational problems do these informal theories pose, and what is the underlying structure of those computations? To do this, I analyze the computational complexity of human language comprehension: what linguistic representation is assigned to a given sound? This problem is factored into smaller, interrelated (but independently statable) problems. For example, in order to understand a given sound, the listener must assign a phonetic form to the sound; determine the morphemes that compose the words in the sound; and calculate the linguistic antecedent of every pronoun in the utterance. I prove that these and other subproblems are all NP-hard, and that language comprehension is itself PSPACE-hard. |
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URI:
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http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7341
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Other Identifiers:
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AIM-964 |
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Series/Report no.:
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AIM-964 |
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Keywords:
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linguistic theory, natural language, computational complexity, government-binding, phonology, syntax |
