Parsing Model and a Rational Theory of Memory

Abstract

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This paper explores how the rational theory of memory summarized in Anderson (1991) can inform the computational psycholinguistic models of human parsing. It is shown that transition-based parsing is particularly suitable to be combined with Anderson's theory of memory systems. The combination of the rational theory of memory with the transition-based parsers results in a model of sentence processing that is data-driven and can be embedded in the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R). The predictions of the parser are tested against qualitative data (garden-path sentences) and a self-paced reading corpus (the Natural Stories corpus).

Keywords

• computational psycholinguistics
• cognitively constrained parsers
• memory retrieval
• rational theory of memory
• modeling reading data