[ Jocelyn Ireson-Paine's home page | Free software | Publications | Interactive category theory demonstrations | Contact ]

Binary holographic reduced representations for SWI-Prolog

These modules implement the binary holographic reduced representations described in

Downloading

The software is here, as a zip file.

Introduction

This is only a brief introduction: for more information, please read the paper. The idea of holographic reduced representations (HRRs) is to represent symbolic information by high-dimensional vectors, and use these vectors for analogical reasoning. In real life, one would make this efficient by using special hardware; my Prolog implementation is not meant to be efficient, but only to demonstrate the principles. There are several versions of HRR, developed by different researchers: I'll talk about that in Kanerva's paper.

Vector functions, and some algebraic properties

In Kanerva's paper, and in my code, vectors are binary, each component being 0 or 1. The fundamental functions are:

There is also a function for generating random vectors, each component of which has an equal probability of being 0 or 1. Other versions of HRR have analogous functions.

Important algebraic properties are:

A ⊗ B = B ⊗ A. 
(⊗ is commutative.)

(A ⊗ B) ⊗ C = A ⊗ (B ⊗ C). 
(⊗ is associative.)

A ⊗ B ⊗ B = A.
B ⊗ B ⊗ A = A.
(⊗ is self-inverse.)

A ⊗ merge( B, C ) = merge( A ⊗ B, A ⊗ C ).
(⊗ distributes over merge.)

Using ⊗ to store a field in, and select it from, a record

With these in mind, suppose we have two vectors called paris and capital. We define a third vector:

france = capital ⊗ paris.
Then:
capital ⊗ france = capital ⊗ capital ⊗ paris
                 = paris.
By commutativity and associativity, france ⊗ capital is also paris.

The point is that we can regard france as a data structure with a capital field whose value is paris. (When I use these names, I mean the vectors they denote.) Then applying ⊗ to france and capital acts as a field selector, and extracts the value paris.

Symmetry between field selectors and fillers

The above reasoning would work the same way for paris ⊗ france, returning capital. Although I may want to treat capital as a field selector and paris as its value, nothing about the vectors themselves forces us to treat one as essentially different from the other. I shan't say much more about this symmetry, but it is an important point of HRR research.

Storing more than one field

Now suppose we have six vectors: capital, paris, location, we (standing for "Western Europe"), money, and euro. And let us now define france by a more complicated equation:

france = merge( capital ⊗ paris, location ⊗ we, money ⊗ euro ).
You can see from the names what this is trying to do.

Selecting when there is more than one field

What happens if we ⊗ with capital, as before? We get these equations. The second follows because ⊗ distributes over merge, and the third because ⊗ is self-inverse:

capital ⊗ france = capital ⊗ merge( capital ⊗ paris, location ⊗ we, money ⊗ euro ).
                 = merge( capital ⊗ capital ⊗ paris, capital ⊗ location ⊗ we, capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro ).
                 = merge( paris, capital ⊗ location ⊗ we, capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro ).

Using dot product and "clean-up" to discard irrelevant data

This is interesting because there are more properties of the vector functions which are important.

First, we assume that A dot B, the vector dot-product, measures how similar A is to B. So if A dot B > A dot C, A is more like B than it is like C.

We also assume that our implementation has an "item memory" or "clean-up memory" that stores all vectors that act as symbols we shall want to recognise. In the above example, these would be capital, paris, location, we, money, and euro.

The point of the item memory is that in a real-life implementation in hardware, and given a vector V, we could very quickly test which vector in the memory V is most similar to. This is "clean up".

How similarity relates to ⊗ and merge

Now we need two more properties:

A ⊗ B is similar neither to A nor to B.

A merge B is similar to A and to B.

So look back at the earlier equations:

capital ⊗ france = capital ⊗ merge( capital ⊗ paris, location ⊗ we, money ⊗ euro ).
                 = merge( capital ⊗ capital ⊗ paris, capital ⊗ location ⊗ we, capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro ).
                 = merge( paris, capital ⊗ location ⊗ we, capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro ).
Because of the third line and the fact that merge( A, B ) is similar to both A and to B, capital ⊗ france is similar to paris, and to capital ⊗ location ⊗ we, and to capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro.

How this relates to the item memory

I said earlier that in this example, the item memory holds capital, paris, location, we, money, and euro.

Assume also that these six vectors have been randomly generated, so that they are extremely unlikely to be similar to one another.

Then if we search the item memory for capital ⊗ france, paris will be the most similar to it. The vectors capital ⊗ location ⊗ we and capital ⊗ money ⊗ euro are similar to capital ⊗ france too, but they're not in the item memory, so a search won't find them.

Analogical reasoning

By extending the example, we can do some interesting analogical reasoning. Let's introduce some new vectors:

sweden = merge( capital ⊗ stockholm, location ⊗ nwe, money ⊗ krona ).
(I am using nwe to stand for North-West Europe.)

Now, what is

sweden ⊗ (france ⊗ paris) ?

france ⊗ paris is similar to capital, by the same reasoning as above. And then if we ⊗ that with sweden, and clean up the result, we should get stockholm. We have used HRRs to solve the analogy problem "what is the Paris of Sweden"? This is one of the examples in Kanerva's paper, and it's why researchers find HRRs so appealing: because of their promise for efficient analogical reasoning.

My Prolog implementation

My implementation is coded in Jan Wielemaker's SWI-Prolog.. It contains three modules, and some test programs.

The modules are:

The test files have names which end in _TEST1.pl. You run them with my Autotest program. Each file contains a sequence of goals which exercise its module's exported predicates.

Documentation

Each module is headed by comments describing its exported predicates. You can see examples of their use in the test files.

Examples

The listing below shows a sample Prolog session with the predicates. It ends with two examples from Kanerva's paper: storing information about France, and answering the questions "what is the Paris of Sweden?" and "what is the Krona of France?" Note that for the ⊗ function, I use two names: bind, and probe. These do exactly the same as one another, but the names make it easier to see whether one is storing data in, or retrieving it from, a vector.

Welcome to SWI-Prolog (Multi-threaded, 32 bits, Version 5.6.58)
Copyright (c) 1990-2008 University of Amsterdam.
SWI-Prolog comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Please visit http://www.swi-prolog.org for details.

For help, use ?- help(Topic). or ?- apropos(Word).

1 ?- cd('c:/kb7/hrr').
true.

2 ?- [paths].
% paths compiled 0.00 sec, 1,104 bytes
true.
Loads search paths used by the modules
when referring to other modules. 

3 ?- [hrr_vectors].
% hrr_vectors compiled into hrr_vectors 0.02 sec, 5,444 bytes
true.
Loads the basic vector predicates.

4 ?- [hrr_item_memory].
% hrr_item_memory compiled into hrr_item_memory 0.00 sec, 4,616 bytes
true.
Loads predicates for handling the item memory.

5 ?- [isv].
% isv compiled into isv 0.02 sec, 5,184 bytes
true.
Loads the "for-convenience" evaluator.

6 ?- isv_assert_dimension(5).
true.
Make the dimension something small,
so that we can look at the vectors.

7 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
true.
There are no symbols in the memory.

8 ?- X isv a.
X = [0, 1, 0, 1, 0].
Has generated a random vector ...

9 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
a
true.
... and added it to the memory.

10 ?- X isv b.
X = [0, 0, 1, 0, 0].
Has generated another random vector
and added it to memory.

11 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
a
b
So these are the two symbols in memory.

12 ?- X isv (a bind b) probe b.
X = [0, 1, 0, 1, 0].
X is the vector for a, above.

13 ?- X isv (c bind d) probe d.
X = [0, 1, 0, 0, 0].

14 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
a
b
c
d
true.
Statement 13 generated random vectors for
c and d, and added them to memory ...

15 ?- hrr_item_memory(Atom,Vector).
Atom = a,
Vector = [0, 1, 0, 1, 0] ;
Atom = b,
Vector = [0, 0, 1, 0, 0] ;
Atom = c,
Vector = [0, 1, 0, 0, 0] ;
Atom = d,
Vector = [0, 1, 0, 1, 0].
... as we see. We also see that
the above result of (c bind d) probe d 
is c. And that the dimensionality is 
so small that there's already a clash
of symbols, between a and d.

16 ?- X isv clean( (a bind b) probe b ).
X = a-1.
The easy way to get the nearest
symbol vector to the result of an expression.
The vector's name is a, and its
similarity with (a bind b) probe b
is 1. Which is not surprising, because
the algebraic properties of bind and
probe mean that (a bind b) probe b is a.


17 ?- hrr_item_memory_retractall.
true.
Clean the memory, because I'm going
to use huge vectors next.

18 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
true.

19 ?- isv_assert_dimension(10000).
true.

20 ?- X isv (c bind d) probe d.
X = [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1|...].

21 ?- X isv clean( (c bind d) probe d ).
X = c-1.

22 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
c
d
true.

23 ?- hrr_item_memory_retractall.
true.

24 ?- france isv capital bind paris.
true.

25 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
france
capital
paris
true.

26 ?- X isv clean( france probe paris ).
X = capital-1.

27 ?- X isv clean( france probe capital ).
X = paris-1.
This works exactly the same as the
(a bind b) probe b example.

28 ?- france isv merge( capital bind paris, location bind we, money bind euro ).
true.
france is now a vector that is similar
to all the arguments of merge.

29 ?- X isv clean( france probe capital ).
X = paris-0.772.

30 ?- X isv clean( france probe paris ).
X = capital-0.772.

31 ?- X isv clean( france probe location ).
X = we-0.7711.

32 ?- X isv clean( france probe we ).
X = location-0.7711.

33 ?- X isv clean( france probe money ).
X = euro-0.7273.

34 ?- X isv clean( france probe euro ).
X = money-0.7273.

35 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
france
capital
paris
location
we
money
euro
true.

36 ?- sweden isv merge( capital bind stockholm, location bind nwe, money bind krona  ).
true.

37 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe capital ).
X = stockholm-0.7749.

38 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe stockholm ).
X = capital-0.7749.

39 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe location ).
X = nwe-0.7265.

40 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe nwe ).
X = location-0.7265.

41 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe money ).
X = krona-0.7718.

42 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe krona ).
X = money-0.7718.

43 ?- hrr_item_memory_listing.
sweden
france
capital
paris
location
we
money
krona
euro
stockholm
nwe
true.

44 ?- X isv clean( sweden probe ( france probe paris ) ).
X = stockholm-0.6791.
What is the "Paris of Sweden"?

45 ?- X isv clean( france probe ( sweden probe krona ) ).
X = euro-0.5939.
What is the "Krona of France"?