ABSTRACT This proposal from the University of Pennsylvania requests funds to establish a Science Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science. The Director of the Center will be Professor Aravind K. Joshi. The Center for Research in Cognitive Science unites a diverse and richly interconnected group from many traditional disciplines (computer science, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology). The goal of the research is to understand the processes and mechanisms by which human beings acquire knowledge about their environment, store and retrieve that knowledge, communicate it to others, and apply it to carry out actions and manipulate their environment. The research is organized into three separate but highly interrelated themes: perception and action, language learning, and language processing. Research in the area of perception and action spans the processes involved in the first stages of visual and auditory representation of spatial and spectral information, to higher order representations of more complex attributes, to the storage and retrieval of such representations by the organism as they are used in goal-oriented actions. The study of language learning focuses on how children develop the abstract representations of language on the basis of their visual and auditory perceptions. The research in language processing combines investigation of formal systems with investigation of computational models, all in the context of empirical study of a wide range of natural languages. Significant features of the perception and action research are its increasing fidelity to actual neural computation and its sophisticated computational modeling and related potential for contributing to artificial intelligence technology. The language learning research has significant potential for technological spin-off in machine learning and automatic acquisition of lexical and grammatical information for language systems, crucial to the development of grammars sufficient for the robust analysis of unconstrained text. And the language processing research will have significant impact on the technological base for human- computer interaction, in particular the design of natural language interfaces for data base and expert systems and knowledge-rich systems in general. This Center will stimulate enhanced activity in precollege education and in the development of human resources.
