Elman recurrent network is a representative model with feedback mechanism. Although gradient descent method has been widely used to train Elman network, it frequently leads to slow convergence. According to optimization theory, conjugate gradient method is an alternative strategy in searching the descent direction during training. In this paper, an efficient conjugate gradient method has been presented to reach the optimal solution in two ways: (1) constructing a more effective conjugate coefficient, (2) determining adaptive learning rates in t...