The Core Method: Connectionist Model Generation for First-Order Logic Programs

Research into the processing of symbolic knowledge by means of connectionist networks aims at systems which combine the declarative nature of logicbased artificial intelligence with the robustness and trainability of artificial neural networks. This endeavour has been addressed quite successfully in the past for propositional knowledge representation and reasoning tasks. However, as soon as these tasks are extended beyond propositional logic, it is not obvious at all what neural-symbolic systems should look like such that they are truly connectionist and allow for a declarative reading at the same time. The Core Method – which we present here – aims at such an integration. It is a method for connectionist model generation using recurrent networks with feedforward core. These networks can be trained by standard algorithms to learn symbolic knowledge, and they can be used for reasoning about this knowledge.