Review Flores

8/12/2019 Review Flores

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170 BOOKREVIEWSlished as String Analysis of Sentence Structure. The Hague: Mouton.1962.

Henisz-Dostert, B., Macdonald, R.R. and Zarechnak, M. 1979. MachineTranslation (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 11). TheHague: Mouton.

Hutchins, W.J. 1986. Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future. NewYork: John Wiley Sons.

Macdonald, R.R. 1963. Georgetown University Machine Translation ResearchProject: General Report, 1952-1963. Georgetown University OccasionalPapers on Machine Translation, 30 Washington D.C.

Macdonald, R.R. 1979. The problem of machine translation. In: HeniszDostert et al. (1979), 89-145.Nirenburg, S. (Ed). 1987. Machine Translation: Theoretical and Method

ological Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Picken, C (Ed). 1987. Translating and the Computer 8: A Profession onthe Move. London: Aslib.Slocum, J. 1985. A machine(-aided) translation bibliography. Computational

Linguistics, 11, 170-183.Zarechnak, M. 1960. GAT Syntactic Analysis. In: J. A. Moyne (Ed), Georgetown University Occasional Papers on Machine Translation 11.Zarechnak, M. 1979. The history of machine translation. In: Henisz-Dostertet al. (1979), pp. 3-87.

Understanding Computers and Cognition: A NewFoundation for DesignTerry Winograd and Fernando Flores

Ablex (Norwood NJ) 1986.ISBN 0-89381-050-3. xiv+207 pp.

MARGARET KINGIS SCO, University of Geneva

The central theme of this book is an intricate and carefully argued discussion of the nature of language and language understanding. Drawing on the

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UNDERSTANDINGCOMPUTERSAND COGNITION 171

seemingly disparate fields of hermeneutics (the school of philosophy concernedwith the role of interpretation in understanding), of neurophysiological work onvision and work on speech acts in analytic philosophy of language, the authorsreach a perception of language as a way of acting in a social context. In theirview, meaning is determined through the interaction of the participants in somelanguage activity with one another and, for some activities, with a written text.The history of the participants as language users also plays a critical role, andit is through the contribution of history that the authors are able to avoid a potential charge of solipsism. It follows that it is fundamentally mistaken to thinkof meaning as independent from language in use.

They insist strongly, too, that language implies a commitment on the partof the language user, so that a computer system, no matter how advanced,could never be said to be a language user in the same way that a person is alanguage user, simply because a computer system cannot, by its nature, enterinto a commitment.

The authors contrast their position with what they call 'the rationalistic tradition', which they encapsulate in a list of the rationalistic steps to be taken tosolve a problem:

1. Characterize the situation in terms of identifiable objects with well-definedproperties.2. Find general rules that apply to situations in terms of these objects andproperties.

3. Apply the rules logically to the situation of concern, drawing conclusionsabout what should be done. (p. 15)When the rationalistic tradition is made manifest in a theory of language,it leads to a belief in sentences as 'saying things about the world'; words aretaken to denote objects, properties, relations or sets of these (in the world), and

what a sentence says is a function of the words it contains and the structuresinto which these are combinedThe authors now face a somewhat uncomfortable dilemma: they want toset up guidelines for the design of computer systems which will avoid therationalistic fallacy, despite the fact that computers must be the most rationalisticof all objects. They resolve the paradox by insisting on the importance of theoverall environment surrounding computer use. As a typical example, theytake the task of a manager. The manager's task is accomplished through anumber of 'conversations for action', where commitments are discussed and

made, promises are made and kept, constraints are worked out and so on. Withinthis overall environment, the computer can serve as a tool, helping, for exampleto ensure good communication through message passing systems which makeexplicit what kind of act is intended to be achieved through sending the message(a request, a promise, a concession ...).I found the abstract technical and philosophical discussion fascinating, illuminating and persuasive, (although I should confess that Iwas already convinced



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172 BOOKREVIEWSof something very close to the authors' views on language). The more concreteproposals, though, were something of a let-down. Perhaps the rather grandiosetitle of the concluding chapter ('A Direction for Design') gave me unrealisticallyhigh expectations; Iwas disappointed by the chapter's level of generality. Similarly, the authors had convinced me of their awareness of the immense intricacyand subtility of language use, so that I felt let down by their presentation of aschema for a basic conversation, with its air of being yet again a magic solution- and very much inside the rationalistic tradition.I felt too that the book sometimes suffered from its joint authorship: therewere times when the flow of argument seemed to be dislocated in order to bringin some topic of special interest to one of the authors.All these should be taken, though, as minor criticisms. The book's chief aimis to challenge an accepted tradition and to propose a coherent alternative. Inthis it succeeds admirably. Even for those who disagree with its central thesis- - and there will be many - it should prove a worthwhile exercise to work outthe grounds of their disagreement This book deserves to be read by anybodyinvolved in any way with artificial intelligence or cognitive science.

Morphology A Study of the Relation betweenMeaning and Form

J.L. BybeeJohn Benjamins (Amsterdam) 1984.Typological Studies in Language 9.ISBN 90-272-2878-7.

PETER LAUEurotra, Commission of the European Communities, Luxembourg

If you are interested in the treatment of morphological phenomena in computational linguistics, you sometimes feel the need for a broad empirical overviewof themanifestations of these phenomena in the languages of the world in orderto be able to evaluate the many different formal approaches offered, and JoanBybee's book looks as if itwould satisfy this need. It does not treat morphology from the point of view of computational linguistics; it is rather based ona traditional taxonomic approach, but it offers an exciting view of the relationbetween meaning and form, viz. thatmorphological form is determined by morphological semantics. If this theory holds, i.e. if a set of semantic determinantscan be shown to produce predictable morphological expressions, any sensible


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