A Biologically Plausible Parser

Daniel Mitropolsky, Michael J. Collins, Christos H. Papadimitriou


Abstract
We describe a parser of English effectuated by biologically plausible neurons and synapses, and implemented through the Assembly Calculus, a recently proposed computational framework for cognitive function. We demonstrate that this device is capable of correctly parsing reasonably nontrivial sentences.1 While our experiments entail rather simple sentences in English, our results suggest that the parser can be extended beyond what we have implemented, to several directions encompassing much of language. For example, we present a simple Russian version of the parser, and discuss how to handle recursion, embedding, and polysemy.
Anthology ID:
2021.tacl-1.81
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9
Month:
Year:
2021
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
1374–1388
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.81
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00432
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Mitropolsky, Michael J. Collins, and Christos H. Papadimitriou. 2021. A Biologically Plausible Parser. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9:1374–1388.
Cite (Informal):
A Biologically Plausible Parser (Mitropolsky et al., TACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.81.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.81.mp4