A Connectionist Model of Unification

TitleA Connectionist Model of Unification
Publication TypeTechnical Report
Year of Publication1989
AuthorsStolcke, A.
Other Numbers531
Keywordsconnectionism, constraint satisfaction, feature structures, Unification
Abstract

A general approach to encode and unify recursively nested feature structures in connectionist networks is described. The unification algorithm implemented by the net is based on iterative coarsening of equivalence classes of graph nodes. This method allows the reformulation of unification as a constraint satisfaction problem and enables the connectionist implementation to take full advantage of the potential parallelism inherent in unification, resulting in sublinear time complexity. Moreover, the method is able to process any number of feature structures in parallel, searching for possible unifications and making decisions among mutually exclusive unifications where necessary.

URLhttp://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/ftp/global/pub/techreports/1989/tr-89-032.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

ICSI Technical Report TR-89-032

Abbreviated Authors

A. Stolcke

ICSI Publication Type

Technical Report