In present study, different parameters, i.e., percentage of NaOH, loading volume, microwave power (watt) and volume of water during pretreatment were optimized by ANN for release of polyphenols and sugars from pine fallen foliage. ANN used was feed forward back propagation type with 72 input, 72 output and 10 hidden layers coupled with Lvenberg-Marquardt (LM) training algorithms. The predicted optimal values by generated neural network for alkali pretreatment were 6 ml (0.5% NaOH)/g of substrate, soaking time of 10 min followed by 1 min of 100W microwave. Pretreated sample on enzymatic hydrolysis at 50 degrees C for 20 h with cocktail of cellulase, xylanase and laccase produced by locally isolated consortia released 668.9 mg/g of total sugar and 265.06 mg/g of total polyphenols. Optimization by ANN showed good yield, therefore, indicating its suitability for bioprocess modeling and control for release of reducing sugars and polyphenols from pine foliage. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.