Undevslanding Conpulevs and Cognilion A Nev Foundalion Jov Besign I Tevv Winogvad:

Fevnando FIoves
Beviev I Mavgavel King
Conpulevs and TvansIalion, VoI. 3, No. 2 |1988), pp. 170-172
FuIIisIed I Spvingev
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170 BOOK REVIEWS
lished as
String Analysis
of Sentence Structure. The
Hague:
Mouton.
1962.
Henisz-Dostert, B., Macdonald,
R.R. and
Zarechnak,
M. 1979. Machine
Translation
(Trends
in
Linguistics
Studies and
Monographs 11).
The
Hague:
Mouton.
Hutchins,
W.J. 1986. Machine Translation:
Past, Present,
Future. New
York: John
Wiley
& Sons.
Macdonald,
R.R. 1963.
Georgetown University
Machine Translation Research
Project:
General
Report,
1952-1963.
Georgetown University
Occasional
Papers
on Machine
Translation,
30
Washington
D.C.
Macdonald,
R.R. 1979. The
problem
of machine translation. In: Henisz
Dostert et al.
(1979),
89-145.
Nirenburg,
S.
(Ed).
1987. Machine Translation: Theoretical and Method
ological
Issues.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Picken,
C
(Ed).
1987.
Translating
and the
Computer
8: A Profession
on
the Move. London: Aslib.
Slocum,
J. 1985. A
machine(-aided)
translation
bibliography. Computational
Linguistics,
11,
170-183.
Zarechnak,
M. 1960. GAT
Syntactic Analysis.
In: J. A.
Moyne (Ed), George
town
University
Occasional
Papers
on Machine Translation 11.
Zarechnak,
M. 1979. The
history
of machine translation. In: Henisz-Dostert
et al.
(1979), pp.
3-87.
Understanding Computers
and
Cognition:
A New
Foundation for
Design
Terry Winograd
and Fernando Flores
Ablex
(Norwood NJ)
1986.
ISBN 0-89381-050-3. xiv+207
pp.
MARGARET KING
IS
SCO,
University of
Geneva
The central theme of this book is an intricate and
carefully argued
discus
sion of the nature of
language
and
language understanding. Drawing
on the
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UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS AND COGNITION 171
seemingly disparate
fields of hermeneutics
(the
school of
philosophy
concerned
with the role of
interpretation
in
understanding),
of
neurophysiological
work on
vision and work on
speech
acts in
analytic philosophy
of
language,
the authors
reach a
perception
of
language
as a
way
of
acting
in a social context. In their
view,
meaning
is determined
through
the interaction of the
participants
in some
language activity
with one another
and,
for some
activities,
with a written text.
The
history
of the
participants
as
language
users also
plays
a critical
role,
and
it is
through
the contribution of
history
that the authors are able to avoid
a
po
tential
charge
of
solipsism.
It follows that it is
fundamentally
mistaken to think
of
meaning
as
independent
from
language
in use.
They
insist
strongly,
too,
that
language implies
a commitment on the
part
of the
language
user,
so that a
computer system,
no matter how
advanced,
could never be said to be
a
language
user in the same
way
that a
person
is a
language
user,
simply
because a
computer system
cannot,
by
its
nature,
enter
into a commitment.
The authors contrast their
position
with what
they
call 'the rationalistic tra
dition',
which
they encapsulate
in a list of the rationalistic
steps
to be taken to
solve a
problem:
1. Characterize the situation
in terms of identifiable
objects
with well-defined
properties.
2. Find
general
rules that
apply
to situations in terms of these
objects
and
properties.
3.
Apply
the rules
logically
to the situation of concern,
drawing
conclusions
about what should be done.
(p.
15)
When the rationalistic tradition is made manifest in a
theory
of
language,
it leads to a belief in sentences as
'saying things
about the
world';
words are
taken to denote
objects, properties,
relations or sets of these
(in
the
world),
and
what a sentence
says
is a function of the words it contains and the structures
into which these are
combined
The authors now
face a
somewhat uncomfortable dilemma:
they
want to
set
up guidelines
for the
design
of
computer systems
which will avoid the
rationalistic
fallacy, despite
the fact that
computers
must be the most rationalistic
of all
objects. They
resolve the
paradox by insisting
on the
importance
of the
overall environment
surrounding computer
use. As a
typical example, they
take the task of a
manager.
The
manager's
task is
accomplished through
a
number of 'conversations for
action',
where
commitments are
discussed and
made,
promises
are made and
kept,
constraints are worked out and so on. Within
this overall
environment,
the
computer
can serve as a
tool,
helping,
for
example
to ensure
good
communication
through message
passing systems
which make
explicit
what kind of act is intended to be achieved
through sending
the
message
(a request,
a
promise,
a concession
...).
I found the abstract
technical and
philosophical
discussion
fascinating,
illu
minating
and
persuasive,
(although
I should confess that I was
already
convinced
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172 BOOK REVIEWS
of
something very
close to the authors' views on
language).
The more concrete
proposals, though,
were
something
of a let-down.
Perhaps
the rather
grandiose
title of the
concluding chapter ('A
Direction for
Design') gave
me
unrealistically
high expectations;
I was
disappointed by
the
chapter's
level of
generality.
Simi
larly,
the authors had convinced me of their awareness of the immense
intricacy
and
subtility
of
language
use,
so that I felt let down
by
their
presentation
of
a
schema for a basic
conversation,
with its air of
being yet again
a
magic
solution
-
and
very
much inside the rationalistic tradition.
I felt too that the book sometimes suffered from its
joint authorship:
there
were times when the flow of
argument
seemed to be dislocated in order to
bring
in some
topic
of
special
interest to one of the authors.
All these should be
taken,
though,
as minor criticisms. The book's chief aim
is to
challenge
an
accepted
tradition and to
propose
a coherent alternative. In
this it succeeds
admirably.
Even for those who
disagree
with its central thesis
- -
and there will be
many
-
it should
prove
a worthwhile exercise to work out
the
grounds
of their
disagreement
This book deserves to be read
by anybody
involved in
any way
with artificial
intelligence
or
cognitive
science.
Morphology
A
Study
of the Relation between
Meaning
and Form
J.L.
Bybee
John
Benjamins (Amsterdam)
1984.
Typological
Studies in
Language
9.
ISBN 90-272-2878-7.
PETER LAU
Eurotra,
Commission
of
the
European
Communities,
Luxembourg
If
you
are
interested in the treatment of
morphological phenomena
in
compu
tational
linguistics, you
sometimes feel the need for a broad
empirical
overview
of the manifestations of these
phenomena
in the
languages
of the world in order
to be able to evaluate the
many
different formal
approaches
offered,
and Joan
Bybee's
book looks as if it would
satisfy
this need. It does not treat
morphol
ogy
from the
point
of view of
computational linguistics;
it is rather based on
a traditional taxonomic
approach,
but it offers an
exciting
view of the relation
between
meaning
and
form,
viz. that
morphological
form is determined
by
mor
phological
semantics. If this
theory
holds,
i.e. if a set of semantic determinants
can be shown to
produce predictable morphological expressions, any
sensible
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