Study 8: NLP and linguistics, psychology, cognition

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that

According to many pop-culture visions of the future, technology will eventually produce the Machine that Can Speak to Us. Examples range from the False Maria in Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis to Knight Rider's KITT (a talking car) to Star Wars' C-3PO (said to have been modeled on the False Maria). And, of course, there is the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey; in one of the film's most famous scenes, the astronaut Dave asks HAL to open a pod bay door on the spacecraft, to which HAL responds, “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that”.

Natural language processing, or NLP, is the field of computer science devoted to creating such machines -- that is, enabling computers to use human languages both as input and as output. The area is quite broad, encompassing problems ranging from simultaneous multi-language translation to advanced search engine development to the design of computer interfaces capable of combining speech, diagrams, and other modalities simultaneously. A natural consequence of this wide range of inquiry is the integration of ideas from computer science with work from many other fields, including linguistics, which provides models of language;psychology, which provides models of cognitive processes; information theory, which provides models of communication; and mathematics and statistics, which provide tools for analyzing and acquiring such models.

About 2 pages of introduction to the topic followed by many references to follow up.

Some are quite technical/ academic.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/papers/cstb/index.html