SLOT & FILLER STRUCTURE

 Monotonic/ nonmonotonic inferences can be performed

more efficiently with these structures than with pure
logic
 The reason that make Inheritance easy is that the
knowledge in slot and filler systems is structured as a
set of entities and their attributes.
 It indexes assertions by the entities they describe. As a
result, retrieving the value for an attribute of an entity
is fast.
 It make easy to describe properties of relations. To do
this in a purely logical system requires higher-order
mechanisms.
WEAK SLOT & FILLER STRUCTURE
 It is a form of object-oriented programming and
has the advantages that such systems normally
have, including modularity and ease of viewing
by people.
 We will discuss two things - Semantic Nets &
Frames
SEMANTIC NETS
 Intersection Search
 We try to find relationships among objects by
spreading activation out from each of two nodes and
seeing where the activation meets. Using this we can
answer the questions like - what is the relation
between India and Blue.
 It takes advantage of entity based organization of
knowledge that slot and filler representation
provide.
 Represent Non-binary Predicates
 Simple binary predicates like isa(Person, Mammal)
can be represented easily by semantic nets but
other non binary predicates can also be represented
by using general-purpose predicate such as isa and
instance.
SEMANTIC NETS
SEMANTIC NETS
Partitioned Semantic Nets
 We want represent simple quantified
expressions in semantic nets. It can be done with
the help of partitioning the semantic net into a
hierarchical set of spaces, each of which
corresponds to the scope of one or more variable.
Eg. - The dog bit the mail carrier.
This is simple and can be easily represented.
Every dog has bitten a mail carrier.
Every dog has bitten every mail carrier.
 Partitioned Semantic Nets

a) The dog bit the mail carrier.

b) Every dog has bitten a mail carrier.
c) Every dog in town has bitten the constable.
d) Every dog has bitten every mail carrier.
SEMANTIC NETS
 Evolution of Frames
As seen in the previous
problem, there are problems which
are difficult to solve with Semantic Nets. Althou
gh there is no clear distinction between a
semantic net and frame system, then more
structure the system has, the more likely it is to
be termed a frame system.
FRAMES
 A frame is a collection of attributes (called slots)
and associated values that describe some entity
in the world.

 Sometimes a frame describes an entity in some a

bsolute sense, sometimes it represents the entity
from a particular point of view only.

 A single frame taken alone is rarely useful, we

build frame systems out of collections of frames
that are connected to each other by virtue of the
fact that the value of an attribute of one
frame may be another frame.
A Simplified Frame System
 FRAMES AS SETS AND INSTANCES
 The set theory is a good basis for understanding
frame systems. Each frame represents
either a class ( a set) or an instance ( an element of
class)
 Considering the Cricket example-

Person, Adult Male, Bowler, Team are all classes.

Sachin and India are entities.
 Both isa and instance relations have inverse
attributes, which we call subclasses & all-instances.
 A class represents a set, there are 2 kinds of
attributes that can be associated with it.
 Its own attributes & Attributes that are to be inherited by
each element of the set.(* - This is how they are
represented.)
 FRAMES AS SETS AND INSTANCES
 Sometimes, the difference between a set and an
individual instance may not be clear.
Example - Team India is an instance of class of Cricket
Teams and can also be thought of as set of players.
 Now the problem is if we represent Team India as a sub
class of Cricket teams, then indian players automatically
become part of all the teams, which is not true. We have
to do something to stop this. Instead we can make Team
India a sub class of class called Cricket Players.
 To do this we need to differentiate between regular classes and
metaclasses.
 Regular Classes are those whose elements are individual
entities.
 Metaclasses are those special classes whose elements are
themselves classes.
FRAMES AS SETS AND INSTANCES
 The most basic meta class is the class CLASS. It
represents the set of all classes.
 All classes are instances of it, either directly or
through one of its subclasses.
 The class CLASS introduces the attribute cardinality,
which is to be inherited by all instances of CLASS.
Cardinality stands for number.
OTHER WAYS OF RELATING CLASSES TO EACH
OTHER
 We have discussed that
 A class 1 can be a subclass of class2.
 If Class2 is a meta class then Class1 can be an
instance of Class2.
 Another way is -mutually-disjoint-with relationship,
which relates a class to one or more other classes that
are guaranteed to have no elements in common with it.
Another one is - is-covered-by
 which relates a class to a set of subclasses, the union of
which is equal to it.
 If a class is-covered-by a set S of mutually disjoint
classes, then S is called a partition of the class.
SLOTS AS FULL-FLEDGED OBJECTS(FRAMES)
Till now we have used attributes as slots, but
now we will like to represent attributes explicitly
and describe their properties.

 Some of the properties we would like to be able to

represent and use in reasoning include:
 The class to which the attribute can be attached

 Constraints on either the type or the value of the

attribute.
 A default value for the attribute.

 Rules for inheriting values for the attribute.

SLOTS AS FULL –FLEDGED OBJECTS(FRAMES)
 To be able to represent these attributes of attributes, we
need to describe attributes(slots) as frames.
 These frames will be organized into an isa hierarchy,
just as any other frames are, and that hierarchy can
then be used to support inheritance of values for
attributes of slots.
 Slot -A slot here is talked about as a relation. It maps
from elements of its domain (the classes for which it
makes sense) to elements of its range(its possible
values). A relation is a set of ordered pairs.
 If relation R1 is a subset of another R2.In that case R1 is
a specialization of R2.
 Since a slot is a set, the set of all slots, which we will call
SLOT, is a meta class. Its instances are slots, which may
have sub slots.
SLOTS VALUES AS OBJECTS
 In the last section, we have used slots as
explicit object that we could make assertions
about.
 Here, we will discuss about using slot
“values” as objects.
 Let’s take the following example
John:
height:72
Bill:
height:
 The only information we have here is that
John is taller than Bill.
SLOTS VALUES AS OBJECTS
 We need to make an statement about the value of
a slot without knowing what the value is. To do
that, we need to view the slot and its value as an
object.
 We will expand our representation language to
allow the value of slot to be stated as either or
both of :
 A value of the type required by the slot.

 A logical constraint on the value. The constraint

may relate the slot’s value to the values of other
slots or to domain constants