The (Non)Necessity of Recursion in Natural Language Processing
Morten H. Christiansen · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2002
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.