It has been argued that models, that are claimed to be models of the mind, have to exhibit a behaviour closely related to human thought. This includes dealing with the issues of compositionality, systematicity and productivity. This paper starts by describing a non-concatenative mode of combination for connectionist patterns of neural activation. We then turn to the issue of systematicity, i.e. structure sensitive processes. We explore this issue to some level of detail, e.g. the importance of choosing the `right' type of representation and how the construction of the training set could result in different types of systematicity.
Annotation: Published in Neural networks and a new artificial intelligence, Dorffner G. (ed.), Thomson, 1997