waterson: nl reading list
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Below is an annotated bibliography of papers and books that I've either read, or want to read. After a while, I realized that I probably ought to put down the reason why I thought something was a good read, or was something that I ought to read.


Allen, J. F., & Perrault, C. R. (1980) Analyzing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence, 15, 143-178.
Appelt, D. E. (1985) Planning English Sentences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(This is sitting on my shelf, waiting for love.)
Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(I think I ordered this one at some point...)
Bock, K., & Loebell, H. (1990). Framing sentences. Cognition, 35, 1-39.
This paper demonstrates that production of some syntactic structures may be "primed" by parsing.
Carberry, S. (1990) Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(This book is on my shelf, waiting for love.)
Clark, H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(This book is on my shelf, waiting for love.)
Cohen, P. R., & Perrault, C. R. (1979) Elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts. Cognitive Science, 3, 177-212.
Green, N., & Carberry, S. (1999) Interpreting and generating indirect answers. Computational Lingusitics, 25, 389-435.
Green, N., & Lehman, J. F. (2002) An integrated discource recipe-based model for task-oriented dialogue. Discourse Processes, 33(2), 133-158.
Describes a Soar agent that builds and uses discourse recipes to communicate in the TacAir domain. Integrates with NL-Soar; recipes are created through planning and chunking.
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. (1986) Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12, 175-204.
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. (1990) Plans for discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication (pp. 417-444). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harris, R. A. (1993) The Linguistics Wars New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.
A lively history about the rise of Chomsky's generative grammar, and the skirmishes that ensued when his students took things too far.
Hindle, D. (1938). Deterministic parsing of syntactic non-fluencies. In ACL-83, Cambirdge, MA, pp. 123-128. ACL.
Hobbs, J. R., Stickel, M. E., Appelt, D. E., Martin, P. (1993) Intepretation as abduction. Artificial Intelligence, 63, 69-142.
A lucid article about using abduction (i.e., inference to the best explanation) as a generic mechanism for resolving ambiguity, metonymy, and reference.
Jackendoff, R. (1983) Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1990) Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
An in-depth look at several semantic categories. For example, "verbs of motion".
Jackendoff, R. (1997) The Architecture of the Language Faculty Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaining, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford University Press, NY.
An comprehensive "re-thinking" of the field of generative grammar. It introduces an architecture that combines morphology, syntax, and semantics in a generative framework.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983) Mental Models. Harvard, Cambridge, MA.
(Waiting on my shelf...)
Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. H. (2000) Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Overview of current state of computational linguistics, emphasizing practical and popular (i.e., statistical) methods for morphological, syntactic, and semantic processing.
Leech, G. N. (1971) Meaning and the English Verb. Essex, England: Pearson Education Ltd.
(This book is on my shelf, waiting for love.)
Levelt, W. J. M. (1983) Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition, 14, 41-104.
Levinson, S. C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
An introduction to the study of discourse. The first few chapters cover deixis, conversational implicature, and speech act theory from a philosophical point of view. The last chapter covers conversational analysis, which is a more empirical approach to conversation. Levinson seems optimistic that conversational analysis may yield important insights into the other areas.
Lewis, R. L. (1993) An Architecturally-Based Theory of Human Sentence Comprehension. Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University. Available as CMU Tech Report CMU-CS-93-226.
A natural language comprehension system implemented in the Soar architecture that correctly predicts human comprehension time, garden-path effects, and parsing breakdown (i.e., "grammatically correct" sentences that considered unparsable by people).
Litman, D. (1985) Plan Recognition and Discourse Analysis: An Integrated Approach for Understanding Dialogues. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. Available as University of Rochester Tech Report 170.
(I can't find this online, so I'll probably have to order it.)
Litman, D., & Allen, J. (1987) A plan recognition model for subdialogues in conversation. Cognitive Science, 11, 163-200.
Moore, J. D. (1995) Participating in Explanatory Dialogues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(I guess I'll need to order this at some point.)
Newell, A. (1990) Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mmm, Soar.
Perrault, R., & Allen, J. (1980) A plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 6, 167-182.
Pollard, C., & Sag, I. (1994) Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jackendoff (2002) cites this work as a precursor to his "foundations" architecture that is in some ways worked out to much greater detail.
Pritchett, B. L. (1992) Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
I think this inspired a lot of Rick Lewis' work in NL-Soar. I guess I ought to order it or something.
Quirk, R., Svartnik, J., Leech, G., & Greenbaum, S. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language Longman, London.
Almost 1,800 pages. Wow. Maybe if I get serious...
Sag, I. A., & Wasow, T. (Eds.). (1999). Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.
(Waiting on my shelf...)
Searle, J. R. (1970) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(I thought I ordered this, but I guess I never did.)
Swinney, D. (1979) Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 645-659.
An article that, according to Jackendoff (2002), demonstrates that "lexical access is semantically promiscuous -- it activates every lexical item that has the right phonology, regardless of meaning." See also Tannenhaus et. al. (1979).
Tambe, M., & Rosenbloom, P. S. (1995) RESC: An approach for real-time, dynamic agent tracking. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95), August 20-21, 1995, Montreal, Canada. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Tannenhaus, M., Leiman, J. M., Seidenberg, M. (1979) Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 427-440.
See Swinney (1979).
Traum, D. & Allen, J. (1994) Discourse obligations in dialogue processing. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp 1-8). Morristown, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics.
van Valin, Jr., R. D. (1999) Introduction to Syntax Unpublished textbook draft.
(Somebody yell if it gets published.)