Okay... so you want to build your own robot and have it discuss with you your plans for world domination. Or... hopefully, you're just a regular nerd person who wants your phone assistant to sound more like Hall and less like... well... some stupid robot.
Welcome to Natural Language Understanding, a subfield of Computational Linguistics/AI, devoted to "building models of natural language production and comprehension" (Allen 1988:1). As a newcomer to NLU, the first question you may have is:
"Which books and papers should I start reading from?"
Here is a reading roadmap!
Note: This repository is a WIP.
LAYING SOME GROUND (OR... BE READY TO GO AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM)
- Books and papers in this section are not exclusively about NLU, but also about rethinking science paradigms and putting them in perspective (you'll soon realize the importance of perspective, by the way). This is due to the fact that NLU acknowledges the importance of curated knowledge bases and (at least some) rules - as opposed to shallow statistics - for the development of talking robots.
[1.1] Klosteman, Chuck (2016). But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. Blue Rider Press. 288 pages. [buy from Amazon]
[1.2] Jones, K. S. (2007). Computational linguistics: what about the linguistics? Computational linguistics, 33(3), 437-441. [download pdf]
[1.3] Van Valin, Jr. Robert D. (MS) "From NLP to NLU." University at Buffalo. [download pdf]
[1.4] Allen, James (1994). Natural Language Understanding (2nd Edition). Pearson. 654 pages. [buy from Amazon]
KNOWLEDGE BASES
[2.1] Fillmore, C. J. (2012). Encounters with language. Computational Linguistics, 38(4), 701-718. [download pdf]
NEURAL NETWORKS
[3.1] Solé, R. V., Corominas‐Murtra, B., Valverde, S., & Steels, L. (2010). Language networks: Their structure, function, and evolution. Complexity, 15(6), 20-26. [download pdf]
[3.2] Dominey, P., Mealier, AL., Pointeau, G., Mirliaz, S., Finlayson, M. (2017). Dynamic Construction Grammar and Steps Towards the Narrative Construction of Meaning. The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding. AAAI Publications. [download pdf]
APPLICATIONS
[4.1] Khayrallah, H., Trott, S., & Feldman, J. (2015). Natural Language For Human Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-Robot Teaming at the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Portland, Oregon. [download pdf]
[4.2] Arbib, M., Barrès, V., Chang, N., Dominey, P., Spranger, M. (2017). Can We Already Conceive of a Computational Construction Grammar That Is Adequate to Address the Data of Neurolinguistics? The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding. AAAI Publications. [download pdf]