Connectionist symbol processing: any progress?

[Timo Honkela]

On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Herbert L. Roitblat wrote:

> 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. (...)

This point of view is most welcome: the view of symbol processing
is often rather limited, e.g., to systematicity and structural issues.
The area of natural language semantics and pragmatics is vast, and
in my opinion, especially unsupervised connectionist learning
paradigm, e.g., self-organizing map, provides a basis for modeling
and understanding phenomena such as subjectivity of interpretation,
intersubjectivity, meaning in context, negotiating meaning, emergence
of categories not explicitly given a priori, adaptive prototypes, etc.
(please see Timo Honkela: Self-Organizing Maps in Natural Language
Processing, Helsinki University of Technology, PhD thesis, 1997;  
http://www.cis.hut.fi/~tho/thesis/).

Adding to the list of references I would like to mention, e.g., 

MacWhinney, B. (1997). Cognitive approaches to language learning, 
chapter Lexical Connectionism. MIT Press. 
(see http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/Local/Brian/)

Miikkulainen, R. (1997). Self-organizing feature map model of the 
lexicon. Brain and Language, 59:334-366. 
(see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/risto/)

Also Peter G"ardenfors has written several relevant articles
in this area (see http://lucs.fil.lu.se/Staff/Peter.Gardenfors/).

Best regards,
Timo Honkela


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