Connectionist symbol processing: any progress?

[Lokendra Shastri]

Dear Connectionists,

I am happy to report that work on connectionist symbol processing 
is not only alive and kicking, but also in robust and vigourous health.

Are we a breadth away from answering all the hard questions about
representation and learning? No. But are we making sufficient progress
to warrant optimism? Certainly yes!

A debate might be fun, but it seems better to start by pointing out a
few other examples of relevant work in the field. This should enable 
those who have not followed the developments to judge for themselves.

Here are some URLs (with many references)

	http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/NTL/
	http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri/shrutibiblio.html
	http://cs.ua.edu/~rsun
	http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~jamie/
	http://www.psych.ucla.edu/Faculty/Hummel/

and here are a few references for readers with limited web access:

Embodied Lexical Development, Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of
the Cognitive Science Society COGSCI-97, Aug 9-11, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997. 
Bailey, D., J. Feldman, S. Narayanan, G. Lakoff (1997). 

Connectionist Syntactic Parsing Using Temporal Variable Binding.
J. Henderson. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23(5):353--379, 1994. 

The Human Semantic Potential: Spatial Language and Constrained Connectionism,
T. Regier, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1996.