Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks.
In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network (SRNN), also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used.
Elman's work was highly significant to our understanding of how languages are acquired and also, once acquired, how sentences are comprehended. Sentences in natural languages are composed of sequences of words that are organized in phrases and hierarchical structures. The Elman network provides an important hypothesis for how such structures might be learned and processed.[1]