A Pdp Architecture for Processing Sentences With Relative Clauses

A modular parallel distributed processing architecture for parsing, representing and paraphrasing sentences with multiple hierarchical relative clauses is presented. A lowel-level network reads the segments of the sentence word by word into partially specified case-role representations of the acts. A higher-level network combines these representations into a list of complete act representations. This internal representation stores the information conveyed by the sentence independent of its linguistic form. The information can be output in natural language in different form or style, e.g. as a sequence of simple sentences or as a complex sentence consisting of relative clauses. Generating output is independent from parsing, and what actually gets generated depends on the training of the generator modules.