Integrating Connectionist and Symbolic Computation for the Theory of Language ; CU-CS-628-92

In this article, we present some of the fundamental principles of a research program - the Sub-Symbolic Paradigm (SSP) - based on a particular approach to unifying connectionist and symbolic computation. SSP has been developed primarily for the study of higher cognitive domains, and in this article we focus on SSP research on language and grammar. The SSP principles integrating connectionist and symbolic computation are developed by establishing mathematical relationships between two levels of description of a single computational system. Applied to natural language, these computational principles entail that a central organizing principle of grammar is optimality. This constitutes a novel framework for formal grammar which emerges from the connectionist computational substrate