A connectionist parsing technique

[Ronan Reilly ERC]

Below is the abstract of a paper that is due to appear in the
journal Network early next year.  A compressed postscript
version (reilly.parser.ps.Z) has been placed in Jordan
Pollack's Neuroprose archive at Ohio State and can be
retrieved in the usual way.
 
Requests for hardcopy should be sent to:
ronan_reilly at eurokom.ie
 
Season's greetings,
 
Ronan
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A Connectionist Technique for On-Line Parsing
 
Ronan Reilly
Educational Research Centre
St Patrick's College, Dublin 9
 
A technique is described that permits the on-line
construction and dynamic modification of parse trees
during the processing of sentence-like input.  The approach
is a combination of  simple recurrent network (SRN) and
recursive auto-associative memory (RAAM) .  The parsing
technique involves teaching the SRN to build RAAM
representations as it processes its input item-by-item.  The
approach is a potential component of a larger connectionist
natural language processing system, and could also be used
as a tool in the cognitive modelling of language
understanding.  Unfortunately, the modified SRN
demonstrates a limited capacity for generalisation.
 
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