Language, Cohesion and Form

by Margaret Masterman , Edited by Yorick Wilks

• ISBN13: 9780521129633
• ISBN10: 052112963X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Margaret Masterman was a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics. Working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, she believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine the meaning of sentences. She was able, even on simple machines, to undertake sophisticated experiments in machine translation, and carried out important work on the use of semantic codings and thesauri to determine the meaning structure of texts. This volume brings together Masterman's groundbreaking papers for the first time. Through his insightful commentaries, Yorick Wilks argues that Masterman came close to developing a computational theory of language meaning based on the ideas of Wittgenstein, and shows the importance of her work in the philosophy of science and the nature of iconic languages. Of key interest in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, it will remind scholars of Masterman's significant contribution to the field.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Basic Forms for Language Structure

Words

Fans and heads

Classification, concept-formation and language

The Thesaurus as a Tool for Machine Translation

The potentialities of a mechanical thesaurus

What is a thesaurus?

Experiments in Machine Translation

'Agricola in curvo terram dimovit aratro'

Mechanical pidgin translation

Translation

Phrasings, Breath Groups and Text Processing

Commentary on the guberina hypothesis

Semantic algorithms

Metaphor, Analogy and the Philosophy of Science

Braithwaite and Kuhn: analogy-clusters within and without hypothetico-deductive systems in science

Bibliography of the scientific works of Margaret Masterman

Other references

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.