Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 1 (NIPS 1988)
James Hendler
One att·empt at explaining human inferencing is that of spread(cid:173) ing activat,ion, particularly in the st.ructured connectionist para(cid:173) digm. This has resulted in t.he building of systems with semanti(cid:173) cally nameable nodes which perform inferencing by examining t.he pat,t.erns of activation spread. In this paper we demonst.rate t.hat simple structured network infert'ncing can be p(>rformed by passing art.iva.t.ion over the weights learned by a distributed alga(cid:173) rit,hm. Thus , an account, is provided which explains a well(cid:173) behaved rela t ionship bet.ween structured and distri butt'd conn('c(cid:173) t.ionist. a.pproachrs.