Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5 (NIPS 1992)
Paul Smolensky
Basic connectionist principles imply that grammars should take the form of systems of parallel soft constraints defining an optimization problem the solutions to which are the well-formed structures in the language. Such Harmonic Grammars have been successfully applied to a number of problems in the theory of natural languages. Here it is shown that formal languages too can be specified by Harmonic Grammars, rather than by conventional serial re-write rule systems.
1 HARMONIC GRAMMARS
In collaboration with Geraldine Legendre, Yoshiro Miyata, and Alan Prince, I have been studying how symbolic computation in human cognition can arise naturally as a higher-level virtual machine realized in appropriately designed lower-level con(cid:173) nectionist networks. The basic computational principles of the approach are these:
(1)
a. \Vhell analyzed at the lower level, mental representations are dis(cid:173)
tributed patterns of connectionist activity; when analyzed at a higher level, these same representations constitute symbolic structures. The particular symbolic structure s is characterized as a set of filler/role bindings {f d ri}, using a collection of structural roles {rd each of which may be occupied by a filler fi-a constituent symbolic struc-