- Author
- Year
- 2009
- Title
- Connectionist semantic systematicity
- Journal
- Cognition
- Volume | Issue number
- 110 | 3
- Pages (from-to)
- 358-379
- Document type
- Article
- Faculty
- Interfacultary Research
- Institute
- Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
- Abstract
-
Fodor and Pylyshyn [Fodor, J. A., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition, 28, 3-71] argue that connectionist models are not able to display systematicity other than by implementing a classical symbol system. This claim entails that connectionism cannot compete with the classical approach as an alternative architectural framework for human cognition. We present a connectionist model of sentence comprehension that does not implement a symbol system yet behaves systematically. It consists in a recurrent neural network that maps sentences describing situations in a microworld, onto representations of these situations. After being trained on particular sentence-situation pairs, the model can comprehend new sentences, even if these describe new situations. We argue that this systematicity arises robustly and in a psychologically plausible manner because it depends on structure inherent in the world.
- URL
- go to publisher's site
- Language
- Undefined/Unknown
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.313021
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