An Ecient Feature-based Connectionist Inheritance Scheme

The paper describes how a connectionist architecture deals with the inheritance problem in an e cient and natural way. Based on the connectionist architecture CONSYDERR, we analyze the problem of property inheritance and formulate it in ways facilitating conceptual clarity and implementation. A set of \benchmarks" is speci ed for ensuring the correctness of inheritance mechanisms. Parameters of CONSYDERR are formally derived to satisfy these benchmark requirements. We discuss how chaining of is-a links and multiple inheritance can be handled in this architecture. This paper shows that CONSYDERR with a two-level dual (localist and distributed) representation can handle inheritance and cancellation of inheritance correctly and extremely e ciently, in constant time instead of proportional to the length of a chain in an inheritance hierarchy. It also demonstrates the utility of a meaning-oriented, intensional approach (with features) for supplementing and enhancing extensional approaches. 1 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I wish to thank Dave Waltz, James Pustejovsky and Tim Hickey for many helpful discussions. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments.