Connectionist representation techniques

摘要

Connectionist natural language processing research has been in the literature for less than a decade and yet it is already claimed that it has established novel styles of representation. This article presents a survey of some of the main representational techniques employed in connectionist research on natural language processing and assesses claims as to their novelty value, i.e. whether or not they add anything new to Classical representation schemes. The main aims are (i) to introduce readers (particularly AI researchers and computational linguists) to the nuts and bolts of the different styles of connectionist representations and (ii) to lay out the direction of research on the new uniquely connectionist representations. These latter representations hold a great deal of promise for the beginning of a new theory of Artificial Intelligence (AI).1