9314467 Kintsch This three-year award supports U.S.-France cooperative research in information sciences between Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado and Guy Denhiere of the University of Paris, VIII. The investigators specialize in systems that mediate between computers and humans, specifically, in natural language understanding. The objective of their research is to develop a new computer architecture for cognition suited to the study of comprehension processes. Their proposed model is a hybrid that combines a production system based on weak rules with a constraint process that stimulates the formation of mental representations. Weak rules, for example, are word identification rules that lead to more than one possible meaning of a word. U.S. and French complementary expertise in theory and experiment will advance this effort. A joint experimental program to test the new model through computer simulations is proposed. This project will advance understanding in natural language processing. ***
