Dynamically adding symbolically meaningful nodes to knowledge-based neural networks

Traditional connectionist theory-refinement systems map the dependencies of a domain-specific rule base into a neural network, and then refine this network using neural learning techniques. Most of these systems, however, lack the ability to refine their network's topology and are thus unable to add new rules to the (reformulated) rule base. Therefore, with domain theories that lack rules, generalization is poor, and training can corrupt the original rules — even those that were initially correct. The paper presents TopGen, an extension to the KBANN algorithm, which heuristically searches for possible expansions to the KBANN network. TopGen does this by dynamically adding hidden nodes to the neural representation of the domain theory, in a manner that is analogous to the adding of rules and conjuncts to the symbolic rule base. Experiments indicate that the method is able to heuristically find effective places to add nodes to the knowledge bases of four real-world problems, as well as an artificial chess domain. The experiments also verify that new nodes must be added in an intelligent manner. The algorithm showed statistically significant improvements over the KBANN algorithm in all five domains.