NIPS preprint available

[Tony Plate]

Preprint Available:

To appear in J. D. Cowan, G.  Tesauro, and J. Alspector,
editors, {\it Advances in Neural Information Processing
Systems - 6 - (NIPS*93)}, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA


  Estimating analogical similarity by dot-products
       of Holographic Reduced Representations.
 
                  Tony A. Plate
          Department of Computer Science
              University of Toronto
                Toronto, M5S 1A4
                     Canada
               tap at ai.utoronto.ca

                     ABSTRACT

Models of analog retrieval require a computationally cheap
method of estimating similarity between a probe and the
candidates in a large pool of memory items.  The vector
dot-product operation would be ideal for this purpose if it
were possible to encode complex structures as vector
representations in such a way that the superficial
similarity of vector representations reflected underlying
structural similarity.  This paper describes how such an
encoding is provided by Holographic Reduced Representations
(HRRs), which are a method for encoding nested relational
structures as fixed-width distributed representations.  The
conditions under which structural similarity is reflected in
the dot-product rankings of HRRs are discussed.

[This paper is possibly relevant to the recent discussion
of the binding problem on this list.  In HRRs, I use
convolution (which can be thought of as a compressed
conjunctive code) to bind roles and fillers, and build up
distributed representations of hierarchical predicate
structures.  This representation preserves the natural
similarity structure of predicates and objects.]

- Obtain by ftp from archive.cis.ohio-state.edu in pub/neuroprose.

- No hardcopy available.

- Software to perform the simulations 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 plate.nips93.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress plate.nips93.ps.Z
unix> lpr plate.nips93.ps (or however you print postscript)