Connectionist syntactic parsing using temporal variable binding

The work discussed here investigates syntactic parsing in the temporal synchrony variable binding model of symbolic computation in a connectionist network that solves the basic problem with previous connectionist architectures, while keeping their advantages.

Abstract

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 lingustic 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.