Background
Yngve, Victor H. was born on July 5, 1920 in Niagara Falls, New York, United States. Son of Victor and Miriam (Huse) Yngve.
(COMIT is a symbol-manipulating (or string-processing) lan...)
COMIT is a symbol-manipulating (or string-processing) language designed to handle texts, words, characters, logical expressions, descriptors, attributes, tags, and the like, and to manipulate them in the computer in ways that are relevant to problems in a variety of fields. COMIT is a general-purpose language which has been most efficiently used for problems in linguistics, mechanical translation of languages, information retrieval, modeling of cognitive processes, theorem proving, game playing, content analysis, graph theory, and many other primarily nonnumerical problems. In addition, COMIT serves as an introduction to a whole class of programming languages and language design features. This book is derived from two older manuals that have been out of print for some time, An Introduction to COMIT Programming and COMIT Programmers' Reference Manual (MIT Press 1962). The programs originally run under COMIT will still run under COMIT II; yet this new publication includes improvements in the language that allow easier programming plus additional facilities. COMIT II is designed to be easily learned and used both as a language for a first course in programming for students in a wide range of disciplines and as a second or third programming language for more advanced students who can use this book for self-study. Included are numerous exercises and problems along with answers, as well as problems to be run on the computer under a problem-grader program that may be obtained from the author. COMIT II is fully available on the IBM 7000 series of computers, including the 709, 7090, 7040, and 7044, and a more recent implementation is available for the IBM 360.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262740079/?tag=2022091-20
(Although efforts have been under way for the past two cen...)
Although efforts have been under way for the past two centuries to treat language scientifically, linguists and others who work with language, speech, or communication have not found an adequate scientific foundation in current linguistic theory. Many of the difficulties are caused by longstanding confusions between the logical domain of science and grammar and the physical domain of sound waves and the people who speak and understand. In this book, therefore, the last impediments of tradition, the ancient semiotic-grammatical foundations of linguistics, are set aside. We move into the physical domain, where theories and hypotheses can be tested against observations of the physical reality. Here new foundations are laid that are fully consonant with modern science as practiced in physics, chemistry, and biology. On these foundations is built a structure of testable specific dynamic causal laws of communicative behavior that provides support for treating previously recalcitrant context-dependent semantic, pragmatic, interactive, rhetorical, and literary phenomena. The central role of context in the foundations of the theory provides the insights of scientific lawfulness while still honoring the particularity of situations celebrated in the humanities.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556195311/?tag=2022091-20
Yngve, Victor H. was born on July 5, 1920 in Niagara Falls, New York, United States. Son of Victor and Miriam (Huse) Yngve.
Bachelor of Science in Physics, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1943. Master of Science in Physics, University Chicago, 1950. Doctor of Philosophy in Physics, University Chicago, 1953.
He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text (a children"s book called Engineer Small and the Little Train). Most importantly, he showed in computer processing terms why the human brain can only process sentences of a certain kind of complexity, ones that do not exceed a "depth limit" (which has nothing to do with length) of the kind established independently by George Miller with his depth limit of "seven plus or minus two" sentence constituents in memory at any given time.
Yngve was also the author of COMIT, the first string processing language (compare SNOBOL, TRAC, and Perl), which was developed on the International Business Machines Corporation 700/7000 series computers by Yngve and collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1957-1965.
Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of linguistics, and more specifically, the area of machine translation for natural language processing.
(COMIT is a symbol-manipulating (or string-processing) lan...)
(Although efforts have been under way for the past two cen...)
Member Linguistic Society of America, Society Linguistica Europaea, Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (vice president 1984-1985, president 1985-1986), Association for Computational Linguistics (co-founder, 1st president 1962-1963).
Married Jean Huber, September 6, 1943. Children: Marna, David, Alan.