An efficient feature-based connectionist inheritance scheme

A connectionist model that deals with the inheritance problem in an efficient and natural way is described. Based on the connectionist architecture CONSYDERR, the author analyses the problem of property inheritance and formulates it in ways facilitating conceptual clarity and connectionist implementation. A set of benchmarks is specified for ensuring the correctness of solution mechanisms. Parameters of CONSYDERR are formally derived to satisfy these benchmark requirements. The author also discusses how chaining of is-a links and multiple inheritance can be handled in this architecture. It is shown that CONSYDERR with a two-level dual (localist and distributed) representation can handle inheritance and cancellation of inheritance correctly and extremely efficiently, in constant time instead of proportional to the length of a chain in an inheritance hierarchy. The utility of a meaning-oriented intensional approach (with features) is demonstrated for supplementing and enhancing extensional approaches. >

[1]  A. Ortony,et al.  Similarity and Analogical Reasoning , 1991 .

[2]  Ryszard S. Michalski,et al.  The Logic of Plausible Reasoning: A Core Theory , 1989, Cogn. Sci..

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

[4]  Roy Rada,et al.  Inheritance generalized to fuzzy regularity , 1990, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[5]  D. Thomas King,et al.  Mind over Machine. , 1978 .

[6]  R. Sun.  Connectionist Models of Rule-Based ReasoningRon , 1991 .

[7]  Stephen I. Gallant,et al.  Connectionist expert systems , 1988, CACM.

[8]  P. Smolensky.  On the proper treatment of connectionism , 1988, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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

[10]  David S. Touretzky,et al.  A Skeptical Theory of Inheritance in Nonmonotonic Semantic Networks , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[11]  James L. McClelland,et al.  James L. McClelland, David Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group, Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition . Vol. 1. Foundations . Vol. 2. Psychological and biological models . Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press, 1987. , 1989, Journal of Child Language.

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

[13]  Philippe Besnard,et al.  An Introduction to Default Logic , 1989, Symbolic Computation.

[14]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations , 1986 .

[15]  Jerome A. Feldman,et al.  Connectionist Models and Their Properties , 1982, Cogn. Sci..

[16]  Ron Sun,et al.  Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Reasoning , 1991 .

[17]  Ron Sun,et al.  A connectionist model for commonsense reasoning incorporating rules and similarities , 1992 .

[18]  J J Hopfield,et al.  Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. , 1982, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[19]  Lokendra Shastri,et al.  A Connectionist Approach to Knowledge Representation and Limited Inference , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[20]  Ron Sun,et al.  Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Reasoning , 1990, Dagstuhl Seminar on Parallelization in Inference Systems.