Integrating Semantic Memory into a Cognitive Architecture

Semantic memory stores a person's general knowledge about the world and plays an important functional role in generating intelligent behaviors. Semantic memory has been an active research field in psychology and is implemented in cognitive architectures such as ACT-R [1] to model various related phenomena in human. However, functionally-based cognitive architectures, such as Soar [2], have not included a semantic memory component and related functions due to their knowledge engineering oriented efforts and the limited learning demands of their tasks. Inspired by semantic memory research in psychology, and aimed to studying the general computational functionalities of semantic memory, its interactions with cognitive architecture and solving more challenging tasks requiring learning, we have started integrating a semantic memory component into Soar. This paper introduces the motivations, architectural design and initial implementations. Empirical results on two simple tasks are presented and future work is proposed.