Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes work on the autonomous semantic network (ASN) knowledge representation and natural language processing architecture and its implementation - the NO HANS simulator. An ASN is an enhanced spreading activation semantic network, but one without a centralized controller. Rather, in addition to the semantic network are types of nodes which have the ability to change links or add nodes in the network. These nodes are activated by the energy spreading through the underlying semantic network. Thus, the same spreading activation which infuses the knowledge representation also drives the control mechanism as well. Because of this,ASN's offer a compromise between the distributed but restrictive connectionist model and the powerful but heretofore essentially serial conceptual natural language processing models.Spreading activation is also the basis for the search capability, which is loosely based on the connectionist winner-take-all idea. We construct a simple conceptual analyzer in this model and indicate how it works.