Knowledge representation, connectionism and conceptual retrieval

Knowledge Representation (KR) systems provide support for Artificial Intelligence systems that reason about relationships between objects in their domains of expertise. Because of their support for inference, KR systems appear to have potential to enrich the kind of retrievals that IR systems might make. Ironically, however, the most useful KR systems are limited to reasoning based on a rigid notion of validity, and thus are awkward to use when relevant but inexact retrievals are desired. We have been exploring the potential of a “connectionist” model—the Boltzmann Machine—to overcome this limitation. We report on a number of experiments in which we use a connectionist simulator to support similarity-based reasoning in a frame representation. We draw some tentative, mixed conclusions on the potential for a union of KR, IR, and connectionism.