Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most inheritance systems which use hierarchi- cal representation of knowledge, do not consider learning. In this paper, a concept hierarchy net- work model based on adaptive resonance theory is proposed for inheritance systems, which ex- plicitly includes learning as one of its major de- sign goals. B y chunking relations between con- cepts as cognitive codes, concept hierarchy can be learned/modified through experience. Fur- thermore, fuzzy relations between concepts can be represented by weights on links connecting them. It is shown that by a spreading activation process based on code firing, and competition be- tween conflicting concepts, the model is able to exhibit property inheritance and to resolve such conflicting situations as exceptions and conflicting multiple inheritance.