A Connectionist Unification Algorithm
Title | A Connectionist Unification Algorithm |
Publication Type | Technical Report |
Year of Publication | 1990 |
Authors | Hölldobler, S. |
Other Numbers | 576 |
Abstract | Unification plays an important role in many areas of computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence. It is also at the heart of connectionist models concerned with knowledge representation and inference. However, most of these models are severely restricted by their propositional fixation as they are defined over a finite set of constants and predicates. This restriction is caused by the inability to unify terms built from function symbols, constants and variables. In this paper a connectionist unification algorithm is presented. It utilizes the fact that the most general unifier of two terms corresponds to a finest valid equivalence relation defined on a occurrence-label representation of the unification problem. The algorithm exploits the maximal parallelism inherent in the computation of such a finest valid equivalence relation while using only computational features of connectionism. It can easily be restricted to solve special forms of the unification problem such as the word problem, the matching problem, or the unification problem over infinite trees. |
URL | http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/techreports/tr-90-12.pdf |
Bibliographic Notes | ICSI Technical Report TR-90-012 |
Abbreviated Authors | S. Hoelldobler |
ICSI Publication Type | Technical Report |