Harmonic Grammar in a DisCo Model of Meaning
This work addresses the integration of distributional and symbolic semantics for cognitive modeling, but it appears incremental as it applies existing ideas to a new framework without introducing new methods or data.
The paper revisits Smolensky and Legendre's model to unify connectionist and symbolic cognitive descriptions, applying their concept of harmony as a graded measure of grammaticality to the DisCo model of meaning.
The model of cognition developed in (Smolensky and Legendre, 2006) seeks to unify two levels of description of the cognitive process: the connectionist and the symbolic. The theory developed brings together these two levels into the Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic Cognitive architecture (ICS). Clark and Pulman (2007) draw a parallel with semantics where meaning may be modelled on both distributional and symbolic levels, developed by Coecke et al, 2010 into the Distributional Compositional (DisCo) model of meaning. In the current work, we revisit Smolensky and Legendre (S&L)'s model. We describe the DisCo framework, summarise the key ideas in S&L's architecture, and describe how their description of harmony as a graded measure of grammaticality may be applied in the DisCo model.