Trajectories through Knowledge Space

Book excerpt: As any history student will tell you, all events must be understood within their political and sociological context. Yet science provides an interesting counterpoint to this idea, since scientific ideas stand on their own merit, and require no reference to the time and place of their conception beyond perhaps a simple citation. Even so, the historical context of a scientific discovery casts a special light on that discovery - a light that motivates the work and explains its significance against a backdrop of related ideas. The book that you hold in your hands is unusually adept at presenting technical ideas in the context of their time. On one level, Larry Bookman has produced a manuscript to satisfy the requirements of a PhD program. If that was all he did, my preface would praise the originality of his ideas and attempt to summarize their significance. But this book is much more than an accomplished disser tation about some aspect of natural language - it is also a skillfully crafted tour through a vast body of computational, linguistic, neurophysiological, and psychological research.