A representational architecture for nonmonotonic inheritance structures (1993)
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Abstract:
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 The problem of structured representation Ideally, object-centred representations (e.g. frames, semantic networks) should be hierarchic, with subclasses and instances having no more than one class to which they belong. But commonsense reasoning is littered with examples of multiple inheritance, where a class takes some or all properties of two or more classes (e.g. electric guitars have properties of electrical devices and of guitars). Also, commonsense reasoning makes widespread use of exceptions:
