On the design of a concurrent object-oriented spreading activation architecture
Corriveau · 1994
The notion of spreading activation over a semantic network is one of the most frequently used approaches to several important problems in artificial intelligence. We first argue that spreading activation subsumes not only marker-passing systems, but also local connectionist and recent 'hybrid' models. We then suggest that spreading activation reduces to the passing of messages between concurrent objects. We argue therefore in favor of the concurrent and object-oriented nature of a general architecture for spreading activation. Concurrency is required for massive parallelism; object-orientedness, for the mechanisms it readily provides for semantic modeling. We then overview an object-oriented framework for spreading activation, which we have implemented in both Smalltalk and ABCL/1. The fundamental characteristic of this implementation is that it is programmable, and thus can accommodate most of the existing spreading activation models.>