Combining a Connectionist Type Hierarchy With a Connectionist Rule-Based Reasoner

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Technical Reports (CIS)
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Shastri, Lokendra
Mani, D. R
Contributor
Abstract

This paper describes an efficient connectionist knowledge representation and reasoning system that combines rule-based reasoning with reasoning about inheritance and classification within an IS-A hierarchy. In addition to a type hierarchy, the proposed system can encode generic facts such as 'Cats prey on birds' and rules such as 'if x preys on y then y is scared of x' and use them to infer that Tweety (who is a Canary) is scared of Sylvestor (who is a Cat). The system can also encode qualified rules such as 'if an animate agent walks into a solid object then the agent gets hurt'. The proposed system can answer queries in time that is only proportional to the length of the shortest derivation of the query and is independent of the size of the knowledge base. The system maintains and propagates variable bindings using temporally synchronous - i.e., in-phase - firing of appropriate nodes.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
1991-05-01
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-91-33.
Recommended citation
Collection