PDP approach to deterministic natural language parsing

The determinism hypothesis proposed by Mitchell Marcus in 1980 has given rise to much debate within the computational linguistics community. Large portions of English can be processed deterministically. While we make no strong commitment to the determinism hypothesis in this paper, we have adopted it along with the basic approach of wait-and-see parsing (WASP) in attempting to develop an approach to parsing which integrates well with current work in parallel distributed adaptive networks. We have implemented a small grammar to test the basic mechanisms of grammar specification and learnability. The grammar used in this experiment was taken from an example in P.H. Winston (1984). In the experiments presented, training was performed from the rules that were known to work for Marcus and testing was performed on actual sentences. The rule codings tend to have many 'don't care' values. During training, these are randomly presented as on or off.