3.5.

Disadvantages for Natural Language

Processing
The tree structure of RvNNs can also be a disadvantage. Using them
means that we’re introducing a special inductive bias (/cs/ml-
inductive-bias) to our model. Here, the inductive bias is the
assumption that the data follow a tree hierarchy. However, when that
isn’t the case, the network may fail to learn the existing patterns.
Another problem with RvNNs is that parsing can be slow and
ambiguous. In particular, there can be several parse trees for a single
sentence.
In addition, labeling (/cs/ml-labeled-vs-unlabeled-data) the
training data for RvNNs is more time-consuming and labor-
intensive than constructing RNNs. Manually parsing a sequence into
smaller components takes considerably more time and effort than
assigning a label to a sequence.

4. RNNs vs. RvNNs: Summary

5. Conclusion
In this article, we explained the advantages and disadvantages of the
recurrent (RNN) and recursive neural networks (RvNN) for Natural
Language Processing.
The main difference is the type of patterns they can catch in data.
While RNNs can process sequential data, RvNNs can find
hierarchical patterns.

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