TR available: inheritance

[Ron Sun]

   An Efficient Feature-based Connectionist Inheritance Scheme

                       Ron Sun 
                       Department of Computer Science
                       University of Alabama
                       Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
--------------------------------------------------------------
To appear in: IEEE Transaction on System, Man, and Cybernetics.
Vol.23. No.1. 1993
----------------------------------------------------------------
The paper describes how a connectionist architecture deals with 
the inheritance problem in an efficient and natural way.
Based on the connectionist architecture CONSYDERR, we analyze 
the problem of property inheritance and formulate it in ways 
facilitating conceptual clarity and implementation.
A set of ``benchmarks" is specified for ensuring the correctness of 
inheritance mechanisms. Parameters of CONSYDERR are formally derived 
to satisfy these benchmark requirements.
We discuss how  chaining of  is-a links and multiple inheritance
can be handled in this architecture.  This paper shows 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.
It also demonstrates the utility of a meaning-oriented, intensional 
approach (with features) for supplementing and enhancing extensional 
approaches.
----------------------------------------------------------------
It is FTPable from archive.cis.ohio-state.edu 
  in: pub/neuroprose (Courtesy of Jordan Pollack)
No hardcopy available.

FTP procedure:
        unix> ftp archive.cis.ohio-state.edu (or 128.146.8.52)
        Name: anonymous
        Password: neuron
        ftp> cd pub/neuroprose
        ftp> binary
        ftp> get sun.inheritance.ps.Z
        ftp> quit
        unix> uncompress sun.inheritance.ps.Z
        unix> lpr sun.inheritance.ps (or however you print postscript)



(a revised version of a previously TR)