{"pk":31350,"title":"The (Non)Necessity of Recursion in Natural Language Processing","subtitle":null,"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 modeling 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.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dw7t45v","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Morten","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Christiansen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1992-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/31350/galley/22419/download/"}]}