Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Frame selection is a fundamental problem in high-level reasoning. Connectionist models have been unable to approach this problem because of their inability to represent multiple dynamic variable bindings and use them by applying general knowledge rules. These deficits have barred them from performing the high-level inferencing necessary for planning, reasoning, and natural language understanding. This paper describes a localist spreading-activation model, ROBIN, which solves a significant subset of these problems. ROBIN incorporates the normal semantic network su^ucture of previous localist networks, but has additional stfucture to handle variables and dynamic role-binding. Each concept in the network has a uniquely-identifying activation value, called its signature. A dynamic binding is created when a binding node receives the activation of a concept's signature. Signatures propagates across paths of binding nodes to dynamically instantiate candidate inference paths, which are selected by the evidential activation on the network's semantic structure. R O B I N is thus able to approach many of the high-level inferencing and frame selection tasks not handled by previous connectionist models.