Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present an approach to the processing of unification-based grammars in the connectionist paradigm. The method involves two basic steps: (1) Translation of a grammar's rules into a set of structure fragments, and (2) encoding these fragments in a connectionist network such that unification and rule application can take place by spreading activation. Feature structures are used to constrain sentence generation by semantic and/or grammatical properties. The method incorporates a general model of unification in connectionist networks.