Welcome to the relational network
We've been looking at tree-like data structures a lot lately,
and by now you're probably wondering what is the big
fascination with these things. The reason we get all tingly
about trees, or any sort of hierarchical data structure, is
that they're great ways to organize knowledge. Traditional
linear structures, like files with lots of records, or even
to some extent simple linear linked lists like those we've
been using in this class, make it difficult to represent the
wide variety of relationships which exist between entities in
the world. Trees get us a step closer to representing the
complexities of relationships between things in the real
world because they get us closer to that notion of a relational
network mentioned above. Many times when we're using computers,
we're really trying to build computational models of some aspect of
the real world, and structures like trees and networks help
us make more useful models.
Networks in the dictionary
We see hierarchical organizations in the real world all the
time. They may not be "pure" hierarchies, but they're
hierarchical in spirit at least. It might be easier to think
of these things as "networks" instead of hierarchies. Take
for example the common dictionary. At first glance, it looks
like a very linear organization of the words in our language.
But what a dictionary really specifies is a very complex and
somewhat hierarchical map of the relationships between the
words in our language. Here are some sample definitions:
dog: any of a large and varied group of domesticated
animals related to the fox, wolf, and jackal
chihuahua: any of an ancient Mexican breed of very small dog
with large, pointed ears
bird: any of a class of warm-blooded, two-legged,
egg-laying vertebrates with feathers and wings
penguin: any of an order of flight-less birds found in the
Southern Hemisphere, having webbed feet and
paddle-like flippers for swimming and diving
ostrich: a large, swift-running bird of Africa and the
Near East; the largest and most powerful of
living birds; it has a long neck, long legs, two
toes on each foot, and small useless wings
canary: a small yellow songbird of the finch family,
native to the Canary Islands
Notice that these definitions all relate the thing being
defined to some larger class of things, and then goes on to
try to distinguish that thing from other similar things.
Note also that as the things being described stray further
and further from what we might think of as being norms or
stereotypes, the definitions get longer and more detailed.
For example, compare the canary (a stereotypical bird) to an
ostrich (an extremely non-stereotypical bird).
When we take the time to look at the dictionary in this way,
we uncover what is essentially a bunch of pointers from one
word to others. Because I'm trying to prove a point here,
I've focused on the animal kingdom, knowing that zoologists
spend a lot of time building these "taxonomies", or
hierarchies of what is related to what. But it works for
things other than animals:
chair: a piece of furniture for one person to sit on,
having a back and, usually, four legs.
And so on. You can look up more if you like. Try "couch",
"sofa", "table", "ottoman", and whatever. No matter what
noun you look up, you'll find the same sort of pattern:
relate this word to a larger class of things, then describe
some features to distinguish this thing from similar sorts of
things. Of course, I've purposely avoided dealing with
another big class of words here--a class you know as "verbs".
We'll save that topic for CS 4344, the course on natural
language understanding.
The dictionary writers don't always help as much as we might
like, however:
rock: a large mass of stone
stone: the hard, solid, nonmetallic mineral matter that
rock is composed of
Except for the extra bit of information that stone is mineral
matter, all we know here is that rock is made of stone, and
stone is what makes up rock. Sigh.
In any case, we can use our high-level data abstraction, the
directed graph, to make these relationships a bit more visual.
For example, from the bird definitions, we can construct the
following abstraction:
vertebrate
^
| is-a
|
| has-part
| /------------- wings
| / reproduction
| /--------------- egg-laying
| / body-temp
| /----------------- warm-blooded
bird--< no. of legs
^ ^ ^ \----------------- 2
/ | \ \ covering
is-a / | \ \--------------- feathers
/ | \ \ movement
color / | \ \------------- flight
yellow ------canary | \
size / | is-a \ is-a
small -----/ | \ movement
| ostrich---------- run
movement | \ size
swim ----------penguin \--------- big
OK, so I fudged this a little. I had to infer that the fact
that birds have wings means that they move around by flying;
the dictionary writers didn't tell us that. And I had to
infer that the fact that birds were egg-laying told us
something about their reproductive processes, and so on. But
you get the idea, no?
Networks in your head
These sorts of knowledge hierarchies show up elsewhere.
Independent of this dictionary organization, psychologists in
the 1960s theorized that humans organize at least some of
what they know in a similar hierarchical fashion. For
example, they said, a person's knowledge of things in the
world might be organized along these lines:
all things
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
physical objects abstract objects
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ time thought
/ \
inanimate animate
objects objects
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
inorganics plants mammals birds
/ \ / \ / \
/ \ / \ / \
rock car dog human canary ostrich
note: assume that all links point upward
This hierarchy is by no means complete, nor is it exactly
what the psychologists, Collins and Quillian, had proposed,
but it's sufficient for our purposes.
If we think of all the upward links as being relationships of
the form, "the thing below is a subtype of the thing above,"
then we have something called a "type hierarchy". And in
fact, we could put the label "S" on all those upward links,
to indicate that the thing below is a "S"ubtype of the thing
above. Folks in the world of artificial intelligence don't
use the "S" or "subtype" terminology very much; instead, AI
folks use the label "is-a" in hierarchies like this, as in "a
canary is-a bird". So these hierarchies can also be called
"is-a hierarchies". Note that we went ahead and used that
"is-a" label in the first diagram above.
In any case, Collins and Quillian backed up their theory with
experiments based on this premise: If people really store
knowledge in hierarchical form, then if they're asked the
right questions, we should note significant differences in
the time it takes those people to respond correctly. For
example, the time to answer "yes" to "Is a canary a bird?"
should be less than the time to answer "yes" to "Is a canary
an animate object?"
The experiments did in fact generate the right numbers, and
for awhile everyone thought the question of how human memory
is organized had been answered. But other experimenters had
difficulty replicating these results, so there was some
controversy about just how Collins and Quillian obtained
their results. Nevertheless, hierarchical models of human
memory are still very popular, although they are considerably
different in their organization than the one we've just
looked at.
Why do the arrows point up?
Well now, that's an interesting question, no? The reason, at
least from either a psychological or AI point of view, is that
humans typically are better at answering questions like "Is a
dog a mammal?" than questions like "Name all the mammals you know."
In other words, people are better at recognition than recall
or retrieval. The upward arrows in our diagrams suggest that
it would be easier to start at the "dog" node and traverse
the link up to the "mammal" node to answer "Is a dog a
mammal?", than it would be to start at the "mammal" node and
try to traverse all the downward links in an effort to
enumerate all the different types of mammals.
Inheritance
We can get more utility out of our hierarchies if we add
important and distinguishing properties (or features or
attributes, all of which are indicated by the links that tend
to go horizontally rather than vertically), like we did in
the dictionary example:
vertebrate
^
| is-a
|
| has-part
| /------------- wings
| / reproduction
| /--------------- egg-laying
| / body-temp
| /----------------- warm-blooded
bird--< no. of legs
^ ^ ^ \----------------- 2
/ | \ \ covering
is-a / | \ \--------------- feathers
/ | \ \ movement
color / | \ \------------- flight
yellow ------canary | \
size / | is-a \ is-a
small -----/ | \ movement
| ostrich---------- run
movement | \ size
swim ----------penguin \--------- big
If we then allow what is called "inheritance" of these
features or attributes, we get a big win. Inheritance means
that one type inherits or takes on the properties of its
supertypes, assuming that there's no information to the
contrary. So, for example, we know that a canary's primary
mode of movement is by flight, even though we don't see that
explicitly represented as a property of canaries, because we
can see that a bird (the supertype of canary) moves by
flight. The canary subtype inherits the property of flight
from the bird supertype. If we didn't allow inheritance in
networks like this, we'd have to attach the property of
movement by flight to every appropriate node in the network.
Not only that, but we'd have to repeat every specific
property everywhere that we wanted it in the network, and
that would cost us a humongous amount of storage space. So
inheritance buys us economy of representation, although any
program that takes advantage of inheritance is going to have
to do some extra work to search around the network and find
out which properties are supposed to be inherited.
We can also make exceptions, and say that a penguin moves
primarily by swimming, even though it's a bird. We add that
property explicitly at the "penguin" node, and it overrides
the default property of movement by flight at the "bird"
node. So, in an "inheritance hierarchy" such as this,
properties are only passed from supertype to subtype when
there's no explicit information to the contrary stored with
the subtype.
Have you seen anything resembling inheritance hierarchies
before? Well, if you've taken CS 2390, or you know anything
about object-oriented programming, it should be obvious to
you that all we've done here is define a set of data objects.
Yes, it's true, long before there was Smalltalk, C++, or even
CLOS (Common LISP Object System), cognitive psychologists of
the 60s, and their counterparts in the land of artificial
intelligence, were laying out the foundations of what would
eventually become object-oriented programming.
How to represent your networks in LISP
Hey, it's simple. Use an association list. You remember a-
lists, right? (Hint: we mentioned them at the beginning of
this set of notes.)
(defun *database* ()
'((canary (is-a bird)
(color yellow)
(size small))
(penguin (is-a bird)
(movement swim))
(bird (is-a vertebrate)
(has-part wings)
(reproduction egg-laying)
:
: )
)
)
You'd use the "assoc" function with a key of "canary" to
extract all the information about the "canary" type. Take
the "rest" of that result to give you a list of just the
links paired with what's at the end of those links. Then use
the "assoc" function with a key of "is-a" to find out which
node is the supertype or parent of "canary". Any pair that
doesn't start with "is-a" is just a property explicitly
represented at that node, which could be inherited by any
subtype below that node. Nothing to it. In fact, you might
even be able to adapt some of that code from way back at
the beginning of this set of notes that showed you how
to traverse a binary list that was implemented as an a-list.
Networks and relational databases
Everything we've shown you so far has been purely tree-like
in form, but as we've said, that's clearly not necessarily
going to be true. In fact, it's much more likely that the
organization in these structures will be much more
convoluted. Consider some of the relationships which may
exist in a small company that makes cough drops:
Smith options
Brothers ---------- pay plans
|\ / \
| \ / \
| \ salaried hourly
| \ / /
dept.| ---- / /
| \ /
| pay / ---- /pay
| plan/ \ /plan
| / dept.\ /
| / \/
engineering shipping
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
Arnie Brian Chuck David
Smith Smith Smith Smith
Ugh. Anyway, welcome to the exciting world of relational
databases. Just like object-oriented programming, relational
database work is something that evolved from artificial
intelligence ideas about how to organize knowledge (although
you'll never get a relational database person to admit this),
which in turn evolved from ideas in cognitive psychology.
Lecture notes by Kurt Eiselt, 1998.
Minor changes / additions by Brian McNamara, 1998.
Last updated on
Mon Jul 20 11:42:42 EDT 1998
by Brian McNamara