Connectionism and

Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Connectionism *

This paper is meant to be an introduction to connectionism for linguists. It covers fundamentals of connectionism and applications of connectionism to human language processing. Because the first (and the last for some) question that linguists want to ask is “why bother with connectionism?” it would be appropriate to try to answer this question first. A quick and rather naive answer is that bot...

Possible Implications Of Connectionism

As far as I can tell the most exciting thing happening in AI these days is the invasion of the brain people (a.k.a. the connectionists). The connectionists haven't really invaded the AI community in the sense of making a planned assault it just seems that connectionism is the sexiest thing around. The AI community has very suddenly become very interested in connectionist techniques and it is on...

Connectionism, Creativity and Guided Walks

Connectionism, Learning and Meaning

There is an apparent anomaly in the notion that connectionism, which is fundamentally a new technology, has considerable philosophical significance. Nonetheless, connectionism has been widely viewed as having implications for symbol grounding, notions of structured representation and compositionality, as well as the issue of nativism. In this paper, we consider each of these issues in detail, a...

Fewer Epistemological Challenges for Connectionism

Seventeen years ago, John McCarthy wrote the note Epistemological challenges for connectionism as a response to Paul Smolensky’s paper On the proper treatment of connectionism. I will discuss the extent to which the four key challenges put forward by McCarthy have been solved, and what are the new challenges ahead. I argue that there are fewer epistemological challenges for connectionism, but p...

Selected Bibliography on Connectionism

The topic of this annotated bibliography is connectionism, a field of computer science that has enjoyed a vast resurgence in the last ten years. Properly speaking, connectionism should be regarded as part of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and up to some years ago it was usually so treated. The earlier entries below will make that clear. Another term for connectionism is Neural Networks, and it...