Connectionist symbol processing: any progress?

[Herbert L. Roitblat]

I don't have answers, but I might add to the bibliography.  Part of the
problem with symbol processing approaches is that they are not as truly
successful as they might pretend.  The syntactic part of symbol processing
is easy and reliable, but the semantic part is still a muddle.  In
English, for example, the words do not really have a systematic meaning as
Fodor and others would assert. I have my own ideas on the matter, but here
are a couple of references on the topic.

Aizawa, K. (1997) Explaining systematicity. Mind and Language, 12,
115-136.
Mathews, R. J. (1997) Can connectionists explain systematicity? Mind and
Language, 12, 154-177.



On Mon, 10 Aug 1998 Dave_Touretzky at cs.cmu.edu wrote:

> I'd like to start a debate on the current state of connectionist
> symbol processing?  Is it dead?  Or does progress continue?
> 
..

> 
> People still do cognitive modeling using connectionist networks.  And
> there is some good work out there.  One of my favorite examples is
> David Plaut's use of attractor neural networks to model deep and
> surface dyslexia -- an area pioneered by Geoff Hinton and Tim
> Shallice.  But like most connectionist cognitive models, it relies on
> a simple feature vector representation.  The problems of structured
> representations and variable binding have remained unsolved.  No one
> is trying to build distributed connectionist reasoning systems any
> more, like the connectionist production system I built with Geoff
> Hinton, or Mark Derthick's microKLONE.
> 
> Today, Michael Arbib is working on the second edition of his handbook,
> and I've been asked to update my article on connectionist symbol
> processing.  Is it time to write an obituary for a research path that
> expired because the problems were too hard for the tools available?
> Or are there important new developments to report?
> 
> I'd love to hear some good news.
> 
> -- Dave Touretzky
> 
> 
> References:
> 
> Arbib, M. A. (ed) (1995) Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks.
> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
> 
> Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., and Patterson,
> K. (1996) Understandig normal and impaired word reading: computational
> principles in quasi-regular domains.  Psychological Review,
> 103(1):56-115.
> 
> Plate, T. A. (1995) Holographic reduced representations.  IEEE
> Transactions on Neural Networks, 6(3):623.
> 
> Touretzky, D. S. and Hinton, G. E.  (1988) A distributed connectionist
> production system.  Cognitive Science, vol. 12, number 3, pp. 423-466.
> 
> Touretzky, D. S. (1995) Connectionist and symbolic representations.
> In M.  A. Arbib (ed.), Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks,
> pp. 243-247.  MIT Press.
> 

Herbert Roitblat, Ph.D.             
Professor of Psychology             roitblat at hawaii.edu
University of Hawaii                (808) 956-6727  (808) 956-4700 fax
2430 Campus Road,                   Honolulu, HI 96822 USA