A Connectionist Symbol Manipulator That Discovers the Structure of Context-Free Languages

We present a neural net architecture that can discover hierarchical and recursive structurein symbol strings. To detect structure at multiple levels, the architecture has the capability of reducing symbols substrings to single symbols, and makes use of an external stack memory. In terms of formal languages, the architecture can learn to parse strings in an LR(O) contextfree grammar.Given training sets of positive and negative exemplars, the architecture has been trained to recognize many different grammars. The architecture has only one layer of modifiable weights, allowing for a straightforward interpretation of its behavior. Many cognitive domains involve complex sequences that contain hierarchical or recursive structure, e.g., music, natural language parsing, event perception. To illustrate, "thespider that ate the hairy fly" is a noun phrase containing the embedded noun phrase "the hairy fly." Understanding such multilevel structures requires forming reduced descriptions (Hinton, 1988) in which a string of symbols or states ("the hairy fly") is reduced to a single symbolic entity (a noun phrase). We present a neural net architecture that learns to encode the structure of symbol strings via such red uction transformations. The difficult problem of extracting multilevel structure from complex, extended sequences has been studied by Mozer (1992), Ring (1993), Rohwer (1990), and Schmidhuber (1992), among others.