Multiassociative Memory

This paper discusses the problem of how to implement many-to-many, or multi-associative, mappings within connectionist models. Traditional symbolic approaches wield explicit representation of all alternatives via stored links, or implicitly through enumerative algorithms. Classical pattern association models ignore the issue of generating multiple outputs for a single input pattern, and while recent research on recurrent networks is promising, the field has not clearly focused upon multi-associativity as a goal. In this paper, we define multiassociative memory MM, and several possible variants, and discuss its utility in general cognitive modeling. We extend sequential cascaded networks (Pollack 1987, 1990a) to fit the task, and perform several initial experiments which demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. This paper appears in The Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. August 7-10, 1991. Multiassociative Memory1