Towards meaning-oriented language modeling

Based on a mathematical model for Skinner's functional analysis of Verbal Behavior, we derive formal definitions for the concepts semantic anchor, utterance-meaning pair, and micro-local grammar. We show how these concepts can be used for designing a bidirectional interface connecting automatic speech recognition to meaning oriented language processing. A semi-automatic process for constructing components for such an interface from sparse data, e. g. collected from Wizard of Oz experiments, is described. Finally, we use our formal approach to investigate some questions concerning the formal complexity of natural language.