Rule Induction through Integrated Symbolic and Subsymbolic Processing

We describe a neural network, called RufeNet, that learns explicit, symbolic condition-action rules in a formal string manipulation domain. of the domain,RuleNet discovers functional categories over elements and, at various points during learning, extracts rules that operate on these categories. The rules are then injected back into RuleNet and in a process called iterative projection. By incorporatingtraining continues, rules in this way, RuleNet exhibits enhanced learning and generalization performance over alternative neural net approaches. By integrating symbolic rule learning and subsymbolic category learning, RuleNet has capabilities that go beyond a purely symbolic system. We show how this architecture can be applied to the problem of case-role assignment in natural language processing, yielding a novel rule-based solution.