Dealing with written language semantics by a connectionist model of cognitive reading

Although machines perform much better than human beings in most of the tasks, it is not the case of natural language processing. Computational linguistic systems usually rely on mathematical and statistical formalisms, which are efficient and useful but far from human procedures and therefore not so skilled. This paper proposes a computational model of natural language reading, called Cognitive Reading Indexing Model (CRIM), inspired by some aspects of human cognition, that tries to become as more psychologically plausible as possible. The model relies on a semantic neural network and it produces not vectors but nets of activated concepts as text representations. Based on these representations, measures of semantic similarity are also defined. Human comparison results show that the system is suitable to model human reading. Additional results also point out that the system could be used in real applications concerning natural language processing tasks.