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From Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Cognitive
Science Society, 1992, p. 665-670. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
The (Non)Necessity of Recursion in Natural
Language Processing
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
The prima facie
unbounded nature of natural language, contrasted with the finite
character of our memory and computational resources, is often taken to
warrant a recursive language processing mechanism. The
widely held distinction between an idealized infinite grammatical
competence and the actual finite natural language performance provides
further support for a recursive processor. In this paper, I argue that
it is only necessary to postulate a recursive language mechanism
insofar as the competence/performance distinction is upheld. However,
I provide reasons for eschewing the latter and suggest that only data
regarding observable linguistic behaviour ought to be used when
modelling the human language mechanism. A connectionist model of
language processing - the simple recurrent network proposed by
Elman - is discussed as an example of a non-recursive alternative and
I conclude that the computational power of such models promises to be
sufficient to account for natural language behaviour.
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