William Heinemann Ltd., London

This paper examines in detail the history of a set of network-structured formalisms for knowledge representation - the so-called semantic networks. While these nets have for the most part retained their basic associative nature, their primitive representational elements have differed significantly from one project to the next. These differences in underlying primitives are symptomatic of deeper philosophical disparities, and a set of five significantly different levels at which networks can be understood are discussed. One of these levels, the epistemological, or knowledge-structuring, level, has played an important implicit part in all previous notations, and is here made explicit in a way that allows a new type of network formalism to be specified. This new type of formalism accounts precisely for operations like individuation of description, internal concept structure in terms of roles and interrelations between them, and structured inheritance.

Int. Journal of Man-Machine Studies 9(2):127-152

Artificial Intelligence 7:21-49.

Publication 29, Institute of Linguistics, University of Stockholm.

IJCAI 4, 134-142.

A general system to simulate human cognitive processes is described. The four-part system comprises a nodespace to store the network structure ; a supervisor; a transition network parser; and an interpreter. The method by which noun phrases operate and the process f or the determiner "the" is presented. An analysis of verb structures illustrates how network structures can be constructed from primitiv e verb definitions that get at the underlying structures of particular verbs. The paper concludes with an illustratio n of a problem in question-asking.In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.

CACM 15:891-905.