Preface

This is an M.Sc. dissertation about a language, and about an artificial neural network which tried to grasp it. The language was English, the network CLASPnet. The results, as described mainly in Chapter 3, were positive.

This is also a dissertation which has been unexpectedly long in the making. If I had not been caught between the requirements of two different M.Sc. programmes, it might even have been finished many months ago. Still, I do not regret my Erasmus stay at the Centre for Cognitive Science in Edinburgh. The city is a stunningly beautiful place to live, and their M.Sc. in Cognitive Science and Natural Language is definitely a challenging programme. (How it actually compares to its Leuven counterpart, the M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence (Option: Cognitive Science) I cannot tell, as I have not attended any courses of the latter.) Many thanks in this regard go to Roger Janssens (Faculty of Arts, Leuven), who was my Erasmus coordinator, Prof. Yves Willems (Computer Science, Leuven), who kindly arranged for the two programmes to be considered equivalent, and Prof. Elisabet Engdahl (CCS, Edinburgh), who supported me throughout my stay in Scotland.

Since my return to Leuven, I have been employed at the Centre for Computational Linguistics (courtesy of Prof. Geert Adriaens), where I have been enjoying the company of Isabel Pype, Frederik Durant and all the other tart-eating linguists. Prof. Adriaens also deserves kudos for allowing me to use the CCL's computer hardware for my own research. Over at the Faculty of Arts, I would like to thank Fred Truyen for giving me the opportunity to become a system administrator, and Ivo Jossart for introducing me to UNIX in the first place.

Special thanks are reserved for my advisor, Prof. Dirk Geeraerts. Not only for being willing to accept my M.Sc. project, but also for patience (when I was leading an e-life), thoughtful advice (when I was contemplating what to do after this dissertation), and a number of useful suggestions about the implementation of CLASPnet.

Then there are of course all the people who have made life agreeable over the past two years: in Edinburgh, I've been very happy to get to know Simon Fallows, Roger Heyes, Scott McDonald, Frank Keller, and Maria Lapata (all at the CCS), and Spyros Pollatos, Simon Law, and Moemi Batshabang (in our apartment at West Mains Road 64/1). Back in Belgium, there have been Benny Corvers, Johan Wouters, Steve Fierens, Joke Verbeek, and the members of the HELix group.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents for making me possible, and my father a second time for proof-reading the drafts and helpful programming discussions.

Ezra Van Everbroeck

Leuven, May 1996