A Representational Architecture for Nonmonotonic Inheritance Structures

This paper describes a connectionist system for representing and reasoning with multiple inheritance structures with exceptions. The representational architecture has three characteristics. First, it merges relational with taxonomic representations. Secondly, it handles conflicts generated by exceptions and the use of multiple superclasses. Thirdly, it uses fully distributed representations. One novel feature is that, since the distributed representation of an entity is influenced by its position in the inheritance structure, representations of assertions are influenced by the context of the entities. An extension to the model which implements and makes use of confluent inference is described.

[1]  Anthony Robins,et al.  The Distributed Representation of Type and Category , 1989 .

[2]  Marius Usher,et al.  An attractor neural network model of semantic fact retrieval , 1990 .

[3]  Eleanor Rosch,et al.  Principles of Categorization , 1978 .

[4]  Jordan B. Pollack,et al.  Recursive Distributed Representations , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[5]  Michael G. Dyer,et al.  Learning Distributed Representations of Conceptual Knowledge and their Application to Script-based Story Processing , 1990 .

[6]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  A Logic for Default Reasoning , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[7]  David Makinson,et al.  General Theory of Cumulative Inference , 1988, NMR.

[8]  A. Tversky.  Features of Similarity , 1977 .

[9]  Geoffrey E. Hinton.  Mapping Part-Whole Hierarchies into Connectionist Networks , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[10]  Marius Usher,et al.  An attractor neural network model of semantic fact retrieval , 1990, 1990 IJCNN International Joint Conference on Neural Networks.

[11]  R. Miikkulainen,et al.  Forming global representations with extended backpropagation , 1988, IEEE 1988 International Conference on Neural Networks.

[12]  Garrison W. Cottrell,et al.  Parallelism in Inheritance Hierarchies with Exceptions , 1985, IJCAI.

[13]  Gerhard Brewka,et al.  Nonmonotonic Reasoning: Logical Foundations of Commonsense By Gerhard Brewka (Cambridge University Press, 1991) , 1991, SGAR.

[14]  Mikael Bodén,et al.  A connectionist model of nonmonotonic reasoning: handling exceptions in inheritance hierarchies , 1994 .

[15]  Lonnie Chrisman,et al.  Learning Recursive Distributed Representations for Holistic Computation , 1991 .

[16]  R. Fisher.  Mathematics of Inheritance , 1933, Nature.