HYCONES: a hybrid connectionist expert system

This paper describes HYCONES, a tightly-coupled Hybrid Connectionist Expert System that integrates neural networks with a symbolic approach (frames). The symbolic paradigm provides rich and flexible constructs to describe the domain knowledge, while the connectionist one provides the system with learning capabilities. The paper describes the architecture of the system, focusing on the hybrid aspects of the knowledge base and on its automatic knowledge acquisition technique from a case database. The first validation of the system is presented. At the end, a comparison with related research efforts and future developments are discussed.