This paper explores the difference between Connectionist proposals for cognitive architecture and the sorts of models that have traditionally been assumed in cognitive science. We claim that the major distinction is that, while both Connectionist and Classical architectures postulate representational mental states, the latter but not the former are committed to a symbol-level of representation, or to a `language of thought': i.e., to representational states that have combinatorial syntactic and semantic structure. Several arguments for combinatorial structure in mental representations are then reviewed. These include arguments based on the `systematicity' of mental representation: i.e., on the fact that cognitive capacities always exhibit certain symmetries, so that the ability to entertain a given thought implies the ability to entertain thoughts with semantically related contents. We claim that such arguments make a powerful case that mind/brain architecture is not Connectionist at the cognitive level. We then consider the possibility that Connectionism may provide an account of the neural (or `abstract neurological') structures in which Classical cognitive architecture is implemented. We survey a number of the standard arguments that have been offered in favor of Connectionism, and conclude that they are coherent only on this interpretation. Connectionist or PDP models are catching on. There are conferences and new books nearly every day, and the popular science press hails this new wave of theorizing as a breakthrough in understanding the mind (a typical example is the article in the May issue of Science 86, called "How we think: A new theory"). There are also, inevitably, descriptions of the emergence of --------------------- 1. This paper is base...

This paper describes NETtalk, a class of massively-parallel network systems that learn to convert English text to speech. The memory representations for pronunciations are learned by practice and are shared among many processing units. The performance of NETtalk has some similarities with observed human performance. (i) The learning follows a power law. (;i) The more words the network learns, the better it is at generalizing and correctly pronouncing new words, (iii) The performance of the network degrades very slowly as connections in the network are damaged: no single link or processing unit is essential. (iv) Relearning after damage is much faster than learning during the original training. (v) Distributed or spaced practice is more effective for long-term retention than massed practice. Network models can be constructed that have the same performance and learning characteristics on a particular task, but differ completely at the levels of synaptic strengths and single-unit responses. However, hierarchical clustering techniques applied to NETtalk reveal that these different networks have similar internal representations of letter-to-sound correspondences within groups of processing units. This suggests that invariant internal representations may be found in assemblies of neurons intermediate in size between highly localized and completely distributed representations.

The computotionol power of massively parallel networks of simple processing elements resides in the communication bandwidth provided by the hardware connections between elements. These connections con allow a significant fraction of the knowledge of the system to be applied to an instance of a problem in o very short time. One kind of computation for which massively porollel networks appear to be well suited is large constraint satisfaction searches, but to use the connections efficiently two conditions must be met: First, a search technique that is suitable for parallel networks must be found. Second, there must be some way of choosing internal representations which allow the preexisting hardware connections to be used efficiently for encoding the con-straints in the domain being searched. We describe a generol parallel search method, based on statistical mechanics, and we show how it leads to a gen-eral learning rule for modifying the connection strengths so as to incorporate knowledge obout o task domain in on efficient way. We describe some simple examples in which the learning algorithm creates internal representations thot ore demonstrobly the most efficient way of using the preexisting connectivity structure. 1.

A major goal of research on networks of neuron-like processing units is to discover efficient learning procedures that allow these networks to construct complex internal representations of their environment. The learning procedures must be capable of modifying the connection strengths in such a way that internal units which are not part of the input or output come to represent important features of the task domain. Several interesting gradient-descent procedures have recently been discovered. Each connection computes the derivative, with respect to the connection strength, of a global measure of the error in the performance of the network. The strength is then adjusted in the direction that decreases the error. These relatively simple, gradient-descent learning procedures work well for small tasks and the new challenge is to find ways of improving their convergence rate and their generalization abilities so that they can be applied to larger, more realistic tasks.

This article presents an overview of recent work on ant algorithms, that is, algorithms for discrete optimization that took inspiration from the observation of ant colonies’ foraging behavior, and introduces the ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic. In the first part of the article the basic biological findings on real ants are reviewed and their artificial counterparts as well as the ACO metaheuristic are defined. In the second part of the article a number of applications of ACO algorithms to combinatorial optimization and routing in communications networks are described. We conclude with a discussion of related work and of some of the most important aspects of the ACO metaheuristic.

Abstract. In this paper three problems for a connectionist account of language are considered: 1. What is the nature of linguistic representations? 2. How can complex structural relationships such as constituent structure be represented? 3. How can the apparently open-ended nature of language be accommodated by a fixed-resource system? Using a prediction task, a simple recurrent network (SRN) is trained on multiclausal sentences which contain multiply-embedded relative clauses. Principal component analysis of the hidden unit activation patterns reveals that the network solves the task by developing complex distributed representations which encode the relevant grammatical relations and hierarchical constituent structure. Differences between the SRN state representations and the more traditional pushdown store are discussed in the final section.

Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuron-style units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland conclude that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. We analyze both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail and discover that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as bringed, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as ated, and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregula...

Abstract: Human agents draw a variety of inferences effortlessly, spontaneously, and with remarkable efficiency — as though these inferences are a reflex response of their cognitive apparatus. Furthermore, these inferences are drawn with reference to a large body of background knowledge. This remarkable human ability seems paradoxical given the results about the complexity of reasoning reported by researchers in artificial intelligence. It also poses a challenge for cognitive science and computational neuroscience: How can a system of simple and slow neuron-like elements represent a large body of systematic knowledge and perform a range of inferences with such speed? We describe a computational model that is a step toward addressing the cognitive science challenge and resolving the artificial intelligence paradox. We show how a connectionist network can encode millions of facts and rules involving n-ary predicates and variables, and perform a class of inferences in a few hundred msec. Efficient reasoning requires the rapid representation and propagation of dynamic bindings. Our model achieves this by i) representing dynamic bindings as the synchronous firing of appropriate nodes, ii) rules as interconnection patterns

In this report we show how the class of adaptive prediction methods that Sutton called "temporal difference," or TD, methods are related to the theory of squential decision making. TD methods have been used as "adaptive critics" in connectionist learning systems, and have been proposed as models of animal learning in classical conditioning experiments. Here we relate TD methods to decision tasks formulated in terms of a stochastic dynamical system whose behavior unfolds over time under the influence of a decision maker's actions. Strategies are sought for selecting actions so as to maximize a measure of long-term payoff gain. Mathematically, tasks such as this can be formulated as Markovian decision problems, and numerous methods have been proposed for learning how to solve such problems. We show how a TD method can be understood as a novel synthesis of concepts from the theory of stochastic dynamic programming, which comprises the standard method for solving such tasks when a model of the dynamical system is available, and the theory of parameter estimation, which provides the appropriate context for studying learning rules in the form of equations for updating associative strengths in behavioral models, or connection weights in connectionist networks. Because this report is oriented primarily toward the non-engineer interested in animal learning, it presents tutorials on stochastic sequential decision tasks, stochastic dynamic programming, and parameter estimation.

A novel modular connectionist architecture is presented in which the networks composing the architecture compete to learn the training patterns. As a result of the competition, different networks learn different training patterns and, thus, learn to compute different functions. The architecture performs task decomposition in the sense that it learns to partition a task into two or more functionally independent vii tasks and allocates distinct networks to learn each task. In addition, the architecture tends to allocate to each task the network whose topology is most appropriate to that task, and tends to allocate the same network to similar tasks and distinct networks to dissimilar tasks. Furthermore, it can be easily modified so as to...