Constructing Meaning in Small Increments
Abstract
Humans comprehend natural language sentences in real time, processing the elements of each sentence incrementally withimmediate interpretation, while working within the limitations of general cognitive abilities. While much research hasbeen devoted to human sentence comprehension, a detailed computational theory of how this is done has been lacking.In this work we explore some fundamental principles of human sentence comprehension, propose a novel computationaltheory of knowledge representation and incremental processing to comprehend sentences using general cognitive abilities,and discuss results of an implementation of this theory in a robotic agent. We then explore the theorys implications forfuture work in various areas of cognitive science.