A Tool for Building Connectionist-like Networks Based on Term Unification

The paper presents a network modeling tool called Net-Clause Language (NCL), integrating some connectionist-like and some symbolic processing features in a uniied computational environment. Unlike the other connectionist symbol processing approaches, NCL represents and processes symbols not by implementing them as patterns of activity in a traditional neural network, rather it uses some connectionist ideas to organize symbolic computation in a more exible way. The paper presents two examples (deductive inference and image processing) which show how the connectionist-like and symbolic features of NCL can beneet each from the other.