Upward Refinement for Conceptual Blending in Description Logic — An ASP-based Approach and Case Study in EL++—

Conceptual blending is understood to be a process that serves a variety of cognitive purposes, including creativity, and has been highly influential in cognitive linguistics. In this line of thinking, human creativity is modeled as a blending process that takes different mental spaces as input and combines them into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this form of combinatorial creativity, a blend is constructed by taking the existing commonalities among the input mental spaces—known as the generic space—into account, and by projecting their structure in a selective way. Since input spaces for interesting blends are often initially incompatible, a generalisation step is needed before they can be blended. In this paper, we apply this idea to blend input spaces specified in the description logic EL++ and propose an upward refinement operator for generalising EL++ concepts. We show how the generalisation operator is translated to Answer Set Programming (ASP) in order to implement a search process that finds possible generalisations of input concepts. We exemplify our approach in the domain of computer icons.COINVENT European Commission FP7 - 611553Peer reviewe

ASP, amalgamation, and the conceptual blending workflow

We present a framework for conceptual blending – a concept invention method that is advocated in cognitive science as a fundamental, and uniquely human engine for creative thinking. Herein, we employ the search capabilities of ASP to find commonalities among input concepts as part of the blending process, and we show how our approach fits within a generalised conceptual blending workflow. Specifically, we orchestrate ASP with imperative Python programming, to query external tools for theorem proving and colimit computation. We exemplify our approach with an example of creativity in mathematics. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.This work is supported by the 7th Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission funded COINVENT project (FET-Open grant number: 611553). M. Eppe is supported by the German Academic Exchange ServicePeer Reviewe

ASP, Amalgamation and the Conceptual Blending Workflow

We present a framework for conceptual blending – a concept invention method that is advocated in cognitive science as a fundamental, and uniquely human engine for creative thinking. Herein, we employ the search capabilities of ASP to find commonalities among input concepts as part of the blending process, and we show how our approach fits within a generalised conceptual blending workflow. Specifically, we orchestrate ASP with imperative Python programming, to query external tools for theorem proving and colimit computation. We exemplify our approach with an example of creativity in mathematics. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.This work is supported by the 7th Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission funded COINVENT project (FET-Open grant number: 611553). M. Eppe is supported by the German Academic Exchange ServicePeer Reviewe

COINVENT: Towards a Computational Concept Invention Theory

We aim to develop a computationally feasible, cognitively-inspired, formal model of concept invention, drawing on Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual blending, and grounding it on a sound mathematical theory of concepts. Conceptual blending, although successfully applied to describing combinational creativity in a varied number of fields, has barely been used at all for implementing creative computational systems, mainly due to the lack of sufficiently precise mathematical characterisations thereof. The model we will define will be based on Goguen’s proposal of a Unified Concept Theory, and will draw from interdisciplinary research results from cognitive science, artificial intelligence, formal methods and computational creativity. To validate our model, we will implement a proof of concept of an autonomous computational creative system that will be evaluated in two testbed scenarios: mathematical reasoning and melodic harmonisation. We envisage that the results of this project will be significant for gaining a deeper scientific understanding of creativity, for fostering the synergy between understanding and enhancing human creativity, and for developing new technologies for autonomous creative systems.The project COINVENT acknowledges the nancial support of the Future and Emerging Tech- nologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the Eu- ropean Commission, under FET-Open Grant number: 611553Peer Reviewe

Computational Invention of Cadences and Chord Progressions by Conceptual Chord-blending

We present a computational framework for chord invention based on a cognitive-theoretic perspective on conceptual blending. The framework builds on algebraic specifications, and solves two musicological problems. It automatically finds transitions between chord progressions of different keys or idioms, and it substitutes chords in a chord progression by other chords of a similar function, as a means to create novel variations. The approach is demonstrated with several examples where jazz cadences are invented by blending chords in cadences from earlier idioms, and where novel chord progressions are generated by inventing transition chords.Project COINVENT/ European Commission FP7 - 611553Peer reviewe

Amalgams, colimits, and conceptual blending

This chapter is a theoretical exploration of Joseph Goguen’s category-theoretic model of conceptual blending and presents an alternative proposal to model blending as amalgams, which were originally proposed as a method for knowledge transfer in case-based reasoning. The chapter concludes with a generalisation of the amalgam-based model by relating it to the notion of colimit, thus providing a category-theoretic characterisation of amalgams that is ultimately computationally realisable.Peer reviewe