ABSTRACT
The fundamental scientific puzzle addressed by the latent semantic analysis (LSA) theory is that there are hundreds of distinctly different human languages, every one with tens of thousands of words. The ability to understand the meanings of utterances composed of these words must be acquired by virtually every human who grows up surrounded by language. There must, therefore, be some humanly shared method-some computational system-by which any human mind can learn to do this for any language by extensive immersion, and without being explicitly taught definitions or rules for any significant number of words.
