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

Two levels of blending with Homophonic Compounds in Japanese

This study states that discourse serves as a crucial factor for a precise understanding of Japanese puns i.e. a word play with homophones, and argues that the double meanings of a pun can be processed at the lexical/phonological level and the discourse level in this order. Homophonic compounds provide speakers of Japanese with a chance to create newly derived meanings from an unexpected use of a given homophonic compound; however, such derived meanings blend right in with the immediate discourse. Such information processing in mind and discourse can be accounted for by Blending Theory (Fauconnier, 1997).El presente artículo muestra que el discurso es un factor crucial para poder interpretar de forma precisa los juegos de palabras japoneses, es decir, homófonos con dobles sentidos. Se defiende que el doble sentido de un juego de palabras se puede procesar al nivel léxico-fonológico y al nivel discursivo por este orden. Los compuestos homofónicos ofrecen a los hablantes japoneses la oportunidad de crear significados derivados novedosos de un uso inesperado de un determinado compuesto homofónico; sin embargo, tales sentidos derivados se integran en el discurso inmediato. Este procesamiento de la información en la mente y el discurso se puede explicar mediante la Teoría de la Integración Conceptual (Blending Theory)

A Description Logic of Typicality for Conceptual Combination

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of combining prototypical concepts, an open problem in the fields of AI and cognitive modelling. Our logic extends the logic of typicality ALC + TR, based on the notion of rational closure, by inclusions p :: T(C) v D (“we have probability p that typical Cs are Ds”), coming from the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics. Additionally, it embeds a set of cognitive heuristics for concept combination. We show that the complexity of reasoning in our logic is EXPTIME-complete as in ALC

A Description Logic Framework for Commonsense Conceptual Combination Integrating Typicality, Probabilities and Cognitive Heuristics

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of concept combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC TR by typicality inclusions whose intuitive meaning is that "there is probability p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds". As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then focus on those scenarios whose probabilities belong to a given and fixed range, and we exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying ALC.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure

Stellar science from a blue wavelength range - A possible design for the blue arm of 4MOST

From stellar spectra, a variety of physical properties of stars can be derived. In particular, the chemical composition of stellar atmospheres can be inferred from absorption line analyses. These provide key information on large scales, such as the formation of our Galaxy, down to the small-scale nucleosynthesis processes that take place in stars and supernovae. By extending the observed wavelength range toward bluer wavelengths, we optimize such studies to also include critical absorption lines in metal-poor stars, and allow for studies of heavy elements (Z>38) whose formation processes remain poorly constrained. In this context, spectrographs optimized for observing blue wavelength ranges are essential, since many absorption lines at redder wavelengths are too weak to be detected in metal-poor stars. This means that some elements cannot be studied in the visual-redder regions, and important scientific tracers and science cases are lost. The present era of large public surveys will target millions of stars. Here we describe the requirements driving the design of the forthcoming survey instrument 4MOST, a multi-object spectrograph commissioned for the ESO VISTA 4m-telescope. We focus here on high-density, wide-area survey of stars and the science that can be achieved with high-resolution stellar spectroscopy. Scientific and technical requirements that governed the design are described along with a thorough line blending analysis. For the high-resolution spectrograph, we find that a sampling of >2.5 (pixels per resolving element), spectral resolution of 18000 or higher, and a wavelength range covering 393-436 nm, is the most well-balanced solution for the instrument. A spectrograph with these characteristics will enable accurate abundance analysis (+/-0.1 dex) in the blue and allow us to confront the outlined scientific questions. (abridged)Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in A

Teoría de la integración conceptual: Una aproximación ontogenética

La integración conceptual es un constructo teórico que pretende dar cuenta del surgimiento del sentido desde una perspectiva cognitiva; no obstante, es una teoría joven y, por tanto, al respecto aún existen vacíos, inconvenientes, infraespecificaciones u horizontes no explorados que es pertinente revisar. Uno de estos vacíos se da respecto al desarrollo ontogenético de la integración y es por ello que en este texto se propone determinar cuáles son y cómo se desarrollan ontogenéticamente las demandas de la tarea de inferir relaciones causales consistentes, necesarias para llevar a cabo los procesos propios de la integración conceptual. Para cumplir con este objetivo se presenta una ruta argumentativa que contempla tres momentos: (i) la Teoría de la integración conceptual en relación con el pensamiento causal y la necesidad de un recuento ontogenético; (ii) las demandas y el desarrollo del pensamiento causal; y (iii) el desarrollo de la función ejecutiva como punto de partida para una propuesta ontogenética del pensamiento causal en la integración conceptual.Requerimientos de sistema: Adobe Acrobat ReaderConceptual Blending is a theoretical construct that aims to account for the emergence of meaning from a cognitive perspective. Nevertheless, it is a young theory and, therefore, there are still gaps, drawbacks, infra-specifications or unexplored horizons that it is pertinent to review. One of these gaps is related to the ontogenetic development of blending and that is why this text proposes to determine which are the demands of the task of inferring consistent causal relations necessary to conceptual Blending, and how occurs the ontogenetic development of these demands. To fulfill this objective, the argumentative route contemplates three moments: (i) the Theory of conceptual blending in relation to causal thinking and the need for an ontogenetic account; (ii) the demands and development of causal reasoning; and (iii) the development of executive function as a starting point for an ontogenetic proposal of causal thinking in conceptual Blending.Magister en Semiótic