The Coffee Story
To see how distributed representations can include compositional structure, consider a connectionist representation of coffee.
The representation can be obtained by subtracting a vector representing the microfeatures of
cup from a vector representing the microfeatures of
cup-with-coffee.
The resulting representation of coffee is context sensitive in a nonclassical way. It is a representation of coffee in the context of a cup.
Paul Smolensky, 1988a.