paper available on connectionist NLP/temporal synchrony

[Jamie Henderson]

FTP-host: linc.cis.upenn.edu
FTP-filename: pub/henderson/jpr94.ps.Z

The following paper on the feasibility and implications of using temporal
synchrony variable binding to do syntactic parsing is available by anonymous
ftp from linc.cis.upenn.edu.  It's in directory pub/henderson, and is called
"jpr94.ps.Z".  It's 20 pages long.  This paper will appear in the Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, probably volume 23, number 6, 1994.

					- Jamie Henderson
					  University of Pennsylvania

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    Connectionist Syntactic Parsing Using Temporal Variable Binding

			James Henderson
		Computer and Information Science
		   University of Pennsylvania


Recent developments in connectionist architectures for symbolic computation
have made it possible to investigate parsing in a connectionist network
while still taking advantage of the large body of work on parsing in
symbolic frameworks.  The work discussed here investigates syntactic parsing
in the temporal synchrony variable binding model of symbolic computation in
a connectionist network.  This computational architecture solves the basic
problem with previous connectionist architectures, while keeping their
advantages.  However, the architecture does have some limitations, which
impose constraints on parsing in this architecture.  Despite these
constraints, the architecture is computationally adequate for syntactic
parsing.  In addition, the constraints make some significant linguistic
predictions.  These arguments are made using a specific parsing model.  The
extensive use of partial descriptions of phrase structure trees is crucial
to the ability of this model to recover the syntactic structure of sentences
within the constraints imposed by the architecture.