A Connectionist System for Rule Based Reasoning with Multi-Place Predicates and Variables

Abstract

Abstract : McCarthy has observed that the representational power of most connectionist systems is restricted to unary predicates applied to a fixed object. More recently, Fodor and Pylyshyn have made a sweeping claim the connectionist systems cannot incorporate systematicity and compositionality. These comments suggest that representing structured knowledge in a connectionist network and using this knowledge in a systematic way is considered difficult if not impossible. The work reported in this paper demonstrates that a connectionist system can not only represent structured knowledge and display systematic behavior, but it can also do so with extreme efficiency. The paper describes a connectionist system that can represent knowledge expressed as rules and facts involving multi-place predicates (i.e., n-ary relates), and draw limited, but sound, inferences based on this knowledge.