Natural Language Processing : The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing

This volume derives from the special conference session entitled “The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal and Computational Issues,” held in conjunction with the 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 19–21, 1998. The special session highlighted talks and posters on current theories of the lexicon from the perspective of its use in sentence understanding. Lexical influences on processing are currently a major focus of attention in psycholinguistic studies of sentence comprehension; however, much of the work remains isolated from the vast amount of scientific activity on the topic of the lexicon in other subdisciplines. In organizing the special session, we felt that the time was ripe to bring together researchers from these different perspectives to exchange ideas and information that can help to inform each others’ work. Participants included a multi-disciplinary slate from theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics, representing various theoretical frameworks within each of these disciplines. The special session was quite successful with about 250 registrants, many of whom do not belong to the usual CUNY crowd.