A Study On The Theory Of Hierarchical Network Of Concepts And Its Application In BA Sentence Comprehension

The Theory of Hierarchical Network of Concepts, HNC for short, is a series of theories for natural language processing on the basis of semantic study. Although HNC is particularly designed for computational comprehension, it is also applicable to human comprehension as well. The comprehension of the BA sentence is designed as a special processing module in the HNC due to its common occurrence in Chinese language learning.The BA sentence is one of the basic Chinese sentence patterns in common use. The study of this sentence pattern is of importance in modern Chinese language study, because it reveals a crucial effect of the function word, BA on the comprehension of the focus in a regular pattern. Chinese, a semantic language, contains function words. However, since the first article on the BA sentence by Li Jinxi in 1924, studies of nearly 80 years have been depending on syntactical analysis, which is more applicable to Indo-European languages instead of Chinese. Insufficient semantic studies of BA sentences produce comprehension difficulties for computers as well as foreign learners of Chinese. Therefore, a more thorough semantic analytical method that matches Chinese characteristicsis needed for further theoretical and practical value.HNC provides an innovative means to BA sentence study, compared with other traditional methods, which arise from a pure perspective of linguistics. HNC has aroused the interest of linguists and is worthy of further study.Objectives:Based on the traditional studies, this thesis applies the HNC method to BA sentence comprehension. A comparative analysis will be conducted to test comprehension of a BA sentence semantic focus using the traditional and the HNC way.Distribution of contents:There are five chapters in this thesis: The first chapter is an introduction of the correlation between HNC and linguistic researches. The chapter will cover the linguistic view of HNC and the representational system based on it. Chapter two will be a presentation of the HNC comprehension mode. Chapter three involves a summary of traditional BA sentence studies. Based on a review of the history and significance of BA sentence studies, this chapter will concentrate on diverse views of the semantic focus. Chapter four is a comparative study of one of thetraditional analyses and the HNC way of BA sentence comprehension. The subjects in the investigation are E-Chunk, a semantic kernel of HNC, and the semantic focus in traditional studies of the BA sentence. The purpose of this comparison is to test whether the HNC method can achieve comparable results of to traditional techniques. Chapter five is the conclusion of this comparative study.Features of this thesis:Firstly, this thesis will demonstrate that traditional studies of the BA sentence are fruitful but are mainly targeted toward human comprehension. Few of them apply to computational comprehension. This thesis attempts to widen the original perspectives into the field of computational comprehension. Secondly, the HNC theory is combination of computer science and linguistics and its researchers are from these two fields. Since HNC's knowledge based is established on Chinese, the linguists involved are particularly scholars of Chinese language study. There are few researchers who are scholars of other languages. This thesis does not deviate from the linguistic field intocomputer science studies, but instead, focuses on the linguistic nature of the HNC method to determine its effectiveness through an investigation of the semantic focus of a BA sentence.