Harmonic Grammar in a DisCo Model of Meaning

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating harmonic grammar into the DisCo model of meaning, combining connectionist and symbolic approaches to better understand cognitive and semantic processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of harmonic grammar within the DisCo framework, linking grammaticality measures to semantic compositionality.

Findings

Harmonic grammar can be applied to the DisCo model.

The approach unifies grammaticality and meaning representation.

Provides a graded measure of grammaticality in semantic modeling.

Abstract

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.