Semantic Networks

A semantic network is a graphical representation of knowledge in which concepts are represented as nodes and the relationships between them as labeled edges, originating in the cognitive psychology research of Allan Collins and M. Ross Quillian in the 1960s. The framework assumes that human memory is organized not as a list of independent facts but as an interconnected web in which retrieval is path-dependent: to verify that a canary is a bird, one traverses the ISA links in the network, and the time required correlates with the distance between nodes. This structural model of memory directly influenced both connectionist architectures and early artificial intelligence knowledge representation systems, and it remains the conceptual ancestor of modern knowledge graph systems and large-scale language model embeddings.\n\n\n\n