Natural Language Processing (NLP) is that part of Artificial Intelligence (Al) concerned with endowing computers with verbal and listener repertoires, so that people can interact with them more easily. Most attention has been given to accurately parsing and generating syntactic structures, although NLP researchers are finding ways of handling the semantic content of language as well. It is increasingly apparent that understanding the pragmatic (contextual and consequential) dimension of natural language is critical for producing effective NLP systems. While there are some techniques for applying pragmatics in computer systems, they are piecemeal, crude, and lack an integrated theoretical foundation. Unfortunately, there is little awareness that Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior provides an extensive, principled pragmatic analysis of language. The implications of Skinner's functional analysis for NLP and for verbal aspects of epistemology lead to a proposal for a "user expert" -a computer system whose area of expertise is the long-term computer user. The evolutionary nature of behavior suggests an Al technology known as genetic algorithms/programming for implementing such a system. Natural Language Processing (NLP) utilizes the concepts and techniques of Artificial Intelligence (Al), philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and related disciplines to create computer systems which mimic human language capabilities. Some of the practical applications of NLP are question-answering and database retrieval, text analysis and generation, and machine translation (Winograd, 1983, pp. 359-360).The "N" in NLP denotes a special concern for natural language (as in conversations between people), in contrast to artificial languages which are designed by people to program and control the operations of computers. The typical task for an aspiring NLP system is to somehow interpret peoples' natural language inputs to a computer without their having to learn an artificial language. A complementary linguistic talent of an NLP system is to make the computer generate text or simulate speech which can be read or heard as if it were written or spoken by another person.
Michael (this issue) defines an establishing operation (EO), such as food deprivation, as (a) altering the effectiveness ofreinforcement as well as (b) evoking behavior. Although this dual role for EOs is compelling, it is possible that such operations have only evocative effects (i.e., function only in the form of antecedent control). The main question raised here is how the reinforcement-altering function can be experimentally analyzed. Evolutionary and conceptual implications of the two-function EO are also considered.
The program of Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) was to specify elementary units of speech and writing, to show how these units combine and vary, continuously and simultaneously, in everyday speaking and in literary contexts, and to ultimately describe a dynamic system -the speaker -whose behavior is by no means independent of itself. But the speaker is not developed through a formal system analysis. Some of the speaker's credibility arises simply from the progressive accumulation of speech samples that are attributed to this anonymous agent: By the book's end, it is inevitable that we see the speaker as being endowed with an extensive repertoire. In effect, Skinner's literary development of the speaker amounts to the construction of a natural concept that intuitively preserves properties we observe in our own behavior -continuity, simultaneity, organization, subjectivity -and that we expect the experimental analysis of behavior to explain.My own attempts to represent Skinner's (1957) qualitative system concept in a quantitative system model, within a coherent algebra of operants and strengthening operations, repeatedly failed. I could perform operant analyses with a certain amount of rigor, but my "repertoire analyses" were hardly more systematic than my sketchy images of the speaker. Like many, I turned to a selectionist framework for organizing the experimental analysis of behavior's disembodied bag of operants. A behavioral
A textual analysis of the concept of strength is presented, based on patterns of its occurrence in the book Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957). A manual count was conducted of all instances of the word "strength," and closely related forms. Rates were then plotted and interpreted as revealing the kinds of situations where strength is most relevant. Strength appears to be most relevant (as measured by instances per page of text) whenever a detailed behavioral analysis involves 1) more than one source of strength for a response, 2) multiple responses or fragments being strengthened by one or more variables, 3) dynamic changes in behavior, or 4) behavior which is not currently or readily observed. Further research is needed to evaluate how textual analysis of this sort contributes to a science of behavior.
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