From Word Stream To Gestalt: A Direct Semantic Parse For Complex Sentences

The integrated processing-decoding network model of St. John and McClelland (1990) was revised to allow extracting the predicate content of complex sentences directly from an incoming stream of word tokens. The input stream was presented to the network without any syntactic markup such as bracketization, and the extraction was done without any explicit emulation of stacking, segmentation, or other such operations that are ordinarily associated with parsing a sentence. The lack of such explicit syntactic operations allowed a simulated neural network of minor complexity to be trained to the task under a simple regimen.