We developed a connectionist architecture that accounts
for the systematicity in the sequentialOTderingof speech
act categories. That is, to what extent can the category
of speech act n+1 be successfully predicted given speech
acts 1 through n? Three connectionist architectures
were contrasted: Elman's recurrent network, a single-
entry backpropagation network, and a double-entry
backpropagation network. T h e recurrent networkfit the
speech act sequences in naturalistic conversation better
than the backpropagation networks. M o s t of the
systematicity w a s captured by the network's use of 2 to
3 prior speech acts of context.
