Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS 1989)
Ajay Jain, Alex Waibel
We present a novel, modular, recurrent connectionist network architec(cid:173) ture which learns to robustly perform incremental parsing of complex sentences. From sequential input, one word at a time, our networks learn to do semantic role assignment, noun phrase attachment, and clause structure recognition for sentences with passive constructions and center embedded clauses. The networks make syntactic and semantic predictions at every point in time, and previous predictions are revised as expectations are affirmed or violated with the arrival of new informa(cid:173) tion. Our networks induce their own "grammar rules" for dynamically transforming an input sequence of words into a syntactic/semantic in(cid:173) terpretation. These networks generalize and display tolerance to input which has been corrupted in ways common in spoken language.