Combinatorial Structures in Language and Visual Cognition
What gives humans the unique ability to construct novel sentences from the building blocks of language? A recent article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences proposes a “neural blackboard architecture” is capable of just this.
From the article (doi: 10.1017/S0140525X06009022):
“This paper aims to show that neural “blackboard” architectures can provide an adequate theoretical basis for a neural instantiation of combinatorial cognitive structures. [...] We also discuss the similarities between the neural blackboard architecture of sentence structure and neural blackboard architectures of combinatorial structures in visual cognition and visual working memory [...]”
As with all main articles in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, this one is followed by extensive comment and criticism from colleagues, and finally a reply by the authors. This provides a very deep look at the article and the issues surrounding it.
An older, but freely available, version of the article is available here.
March 24th, 2006 at 6:24 am
My commentary on the van der Velde & de Kamps article is available from my home page: http://r.gayler.googlepages.com/home
Anyone interested in the neural representation of combinatorial structures may want to look at the symposium on Compositional Connectionism that Simon Levy and I organised: http://www.cs.wlu.edu/~levy/aaai04/