The Language Complexity Game

Ristad, Eric Sven

ISBN 10: 0262181479 / ISBN 13: 9780262181471

Published by MIT Press, Boston, 1993

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 000731

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Language Complexity Game
• Publisher: MIT Press, Boston
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262181479
• ISBN 13: 9780262181471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Linguistics

About this title

Synopsis

This work elucidates the structure and complexity of human language in terms of the mathematics of information and computation. It strengthens Chomsky's early work on the mathematics of language, with the advantages of a better understanding of language and a more precise theory of structural complexity.

Ristad argues that language is the process of constructing linguistic representations from the forms produced by other cognitive modules and that this process is NP-complete.

This NP-completeness is defended with a phalanx of elegant and revealing proofs that rely only on the empirical facts of linguistic knowledge and on the uncontroverted assumption that these facts generalize in a reasonable manner. For this reason, these complexity results apply to all adequate linguistic theories and are the first to do so.

Eric Sven Ristad is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is the coauthor of Computational Complexity and Natural Language.

Contents: Foundation of the Investigation. Anaphora. Ellipsis. Phonology. Syntactic Agreement and Lexical Ambiguity. Philosophical Issues.

About the Author

Eric Sven Ristad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University.