Learning and Extracting Initial Mealy Automata with a Modular Neural Network Model

A hybrid recurrent neural network is shown to learn small initial mealy machines (that can be thought of as translation machines translating input strings to corresponding output strings, as opposed to recognition automata that classify strings as either grammatical or nongrammatical) from positive training samples. A well-trained neural net is then presented once again with the training set and a Kohonen self-organizing map with the “star” topology of neurons is used to quantize recurrent network state space into distinct regions representing corresponding states of a mealy machine being learned. This enables us to extract the learned mealy machine from the trained recurrent network. One neural network (Kohonen self-organizing map) is used to extract meaningful information from another network (recurrent neural network).