Date: Thu, 07 Nov 1996 19:07:19 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Fri, 05 Jan 1996 19:49:51 GMT Content-length: 3473 Home Page of Sheldon Klein

Sheldon Klein

Professor of Computer Sciences and Linguistics

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

telephone: (608) 262-1204
fax: (608) 262-9777
email: sklein@cs.wisc.edu
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1963
Interests: Meta-linguistic pragmatics of artificial intelligence and grammars, archaeology of knowledge structures, testing theories of language change and transmission


Research Summary

My interests are expressed in two related research efforts:

1. The first involves a meta-linguistic, natural language processing system that can be configured to model a variety of theoretical linguistic models. It's semantic structures are in the form of a relational calculus that can be expressed in implicit semantic networks. The basic semantic units are objects and relations. Objects may be atoms of classes, or contain relational structures. Relations may be logical operators. All units in the system are associated with Boolean feature vectors. During the course of generation or recognition, inheritance of features is bi-directional. Because relations can be defined as logical operators, script-like, world knowledge rules can be encoded in the same notation used to map semantic structures to syntactic units. Semantic/syntactic production rules are represented as data, and the same rules can be used for both generation and recognition. The system can contain more than one grammar, thereby allowing it to be configured either as a machine translation system, or as a natural language interface to application command languages.

2. The combinatoric problems associated with unrestricted models of human language processing suggest that real-world knowledge systems may have evolved in forms that make combinatoric processing problems linear. I am currently investigating the role of Boolean groups and analogy in complex behavioral systems, including the representation of categorial grammars. Grammars in this notation can readily be implemented in connectionist models, and may provide a transparent means of linking language structure to neural net theory. My research effort has occasionally involved analysis of archaeological materials as early as the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition.

Sample Recent Publications

Human cognitive changes at the middle to upper Paleolithic transition: The evidence of Boker Tachtit, in The Emergence of Modern Humans: An Archaeological Perspective, P. Mellars, ed., pp. 499-516, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1990.

The invention of computationally plausible knowledge systems in the upper Paleolithic, in The Origins of Human Behaviour, R. Foley, ed., pp. 67-81, Unwin Hyman, London, 1991.

Grammars, the I Ching and Levi-Strauss: More on Siemens' `Three Formal Theories of Cultural Analogy', to appear in Journal of Quantitative Anthropology.


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