2026-09-19T15:57:04Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/460372022-01-13T07:54:29Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Patrick Henry Winston.
Klein, Michael Tully, Jr
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2009-06-30T17:06:43Z
2009-06-30T17:06:43Z
2008
2008
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46037
367652875
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 49).
A computer program that can understand the meaning of written English must be tremendously complex. It would break the spirit of any programmer to try to code such a program by hand; the range of meaning we can express in natural language is far too broad, too nuanced, too filled with exception. So I present UNDERSTAND, a program you can teach by example. Learning by example is an engineering expedient: it is much easier for us to come up with specific examples of a concept than some sort of perfect Platonic model. UNDERSTAND uses a technique I call Lattice-Learning to generalize accurately from just a few examples: "Robins, bees and helicopters can fly, but cats, worms and boats cannot," is enough for UNDERSTAND to narrow in on our concept of flying things: birds, insects and aircraft. It takes only 8 positive and 4 negative examples to teach UNDERSTAND how to interpret sentences as complicated as "The cat ran from the yard because a dog appeared." UNDERSTAND is implemented in 2300 lines of Java.
by Michael Tully Klein, Jr.
M.Eng.
49 p.
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.I.T. theses are protected by
copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but
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http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Understanding English with lattice-learning
Thesis
application/pdf
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