This paper describes a connectionist system for representing and reasoning with multiple inheritance structures with exceptions. The representational architecture has three characteristics. First, it merges relational with taxonomic representations. Secondly, it handles conflicts generated by exceptions and the use of multiple superclasses. Thirdly, it uses fully distributed representations. One novel feature is that, since the distributed representation of an entity is influenced by its position in the inheritance structure, representations of assertions are influenced by the context of the entities. An extension to the model which implements and makes use of confluent inference is described.
HS-IDA-TR-93-001. Published in Proceedings of the International Conference of Artificial Neural Networks -- 1993, Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2063-6_79