Hype-a-mania strikes

[Gary Cottrell]

Jordan Pollack wrote to me:

	you write:

	>>Interesting work along these lines has been done by Servan-Schreiber
	>>et al., & Jeff Elman, where they show that certain kinds of FSM's
	>>are hard for simple recurrent nets to learn, and Jeff shows that
	>>a net can learn the syntactic structure of English, but is poor
	>>at center embedding, while being fine with tail recursive clauses.

	Isn't this overclaiming elman's work just a TAD, gary? 
	And SS showed that SRN's didn't have a hope of doing 
	unbounded dependencies unless they were statistically differentiated.

	jordan

Mea Culpa!!!

Yes, I'm sorry, I should not have said "learns the syntactic
structure of english". I should have said "learns the structure
of sentences generated by a grammar with embedded clauses".
Re: Servan-schreiber's work, I thought I *did* say that "certain
FSM's are hard to learn" about SS et al. In any case, all they showed
was that theye were hard to learn using their training scheme.

Other training schemes may work, such as Combined Subset Training
(Tsung & Cottrell, 1989, IJCNN; Cottrell & Tsung, 1989, Cog Sci Proc),
which is similar to Jeff Elman's technique of starting with simple 
sentences and progressively adding more complex ones.

Hype-a-mania strikes deep...
Into your life it will creep...

gary cottrell