  Recursive neural models, which use syntactic parse trees to recursively
generate representations bottom-up, are a popular architecture. But there have
not been rigorous evaluations showing for exactly which tasks this syntax-based
method is appropriate. In this paper we benchmark {\bf recursive} neural models
against sequential {\bf recurrent} neural models (simple recurrent and LSTM
models), enforcing apples-to-apples comparison as much as possible. We
investigate 4 tasks: (1) sentiment classification at the sentence level and
phrase level; (2) matching questions to answer-phrases; (3) discourse parsing;
(4) semantic relation extraction (e.g., {\em component-whole} between nouns).
  Our goal is to understand better when, and why, recursive models can
outperform simpler models. We find that recursive models help mainly on tasks
(like semantic relation extraction) that require associating headwords across a
long distance, particularly on very long sequences. We then introduce a method
for allowing recurrent models to achieve similar performance: breaking long
sentences into clause-like units at punctuation and processing them separately
before combining. Our results thus help understand the limitations of both
classes of models, and suggest directions for improving recurrent models.
