Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One important problem to be addressed in realizing connectionist reasoning systems is that of dynamically creating more complex structured objects out of simpler ones during the reasoning process. In rule based reasoning, this problem typically manifests as the problem of dynamically binding objects to the arguments of a relation. In [1,7], w e described a rule-based reasoning system based on the idea of using synchronous activation to represent bindings. A s done in almost all other connectionist reasoning systems developed so far, there, w e restricted our focus on the problem of binding only static objects to arguments. This paper describes how the synchronous activation approach can be extended to bind dynamically created objects to arguments, to form more complex dynamic objects. This extension allows the rule-based reasoning system to deal with function symbols. A forward reasoning system incorporating function terms is described in some detail. A backward reasoning system with similar capabilities is briefly sketched and the way of encoding long-term facts involving function terms is indicated. Several extensions to the work are briefly described, one of them being that of combining the rule based reasoner with a parallelly operating equality reasoner. The equality reasoner derives new facts by substituting equivalent terms for the terms occurring in the facts derived by the rule-based reasoner.