Abstract
This paper reports conclusions of the Groningen based Research Group INFORMATICA HUMANA in efforts to formulate a General Theory of Systems of Symbolic Expressions. This work was a by-product of projects in Natural Language processing for Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, and Literary Text Analysis begun in 1976. These activities, of considerable practical and economic importance, are also potentially interesting as simulations of human functioning. Not enough has been understood about human communication and the underlying cognitive processes, however, to be able to accord this much significance to any Natural Language Proccessing system that has been built so far. Relevant factual knowledge abounds from the neural and behaviour sciences and the study of languages, but the appropriate abstractions to organize this knowledge are slow in appearing. Our “theory” is very abstract, but it implies a methodology of Data Abstraction, not merely to give the abstraction an empirical content, but to cope with real complexity in a cumulative “inductive” way in finite domains for which human intuitions lead to strong and reliable judgements. In Physics, we think of real world objects as parameterized with constants of infinite type, but measurement is not primary in human knowledge. Cognition deals also with qualitative values, so we should expect finite symbolic expressions of cognitive systems and of overt languages to bear only partial information of the real objects that they denote. Approximate infinitistic methods with limit considerations are called for. Our approach has been put together from bits-and-pieces of formal theory borrowed from Dana Scott and insights concerning natural language processing and the acquisition and management of language data from Makoto Nagao. We have used their ideas with little originality of our own to make a set of necessary empirical assumptions rhyme coherently and to contrive a way of representing symbolic representations with qualitative values so that it would be decidabie if they are comprehended by the Scott Domain. We can perhaps claim some merit for the innovation of the convention of complex symbols to deal with object specific syntax in natural languages — but this is only a different formulation of Nagao’s notion of a linguistic knowledge base with records containing “lexically specific” information.
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Stuart, D.G., Campbell, H.W. (1988). Cognition and the General Theory of Symbolic Expressions. In: Carvallo, M.E. (eds) Nature, Cognition and System I. Theory and Decision Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2991-3_2
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