Concepts in Action

This open access book is a timely contribution in presenting recent issues, approaches, and results that are not only central to the highly interdisciplinary field of concept research but also particularly important to newly emergent paradigms and challenges. The contributors present a unique, holistic picture for the understanding and use of concepts from a wide range of fields including cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. The chapters focus on three distinct points of view that lie at the core of concept research: representation, learning, and application. The contributions present a combination of theoretical, experimental, computational, and applied methods that appeal to students and researchers working in these fields

Personalized NewsEvent Retrieval for Small Talk in Social Dialog Systems

This paper presents the NewsTeller system which retrieves a news event based on a user query and the user’s general interests. It can be used by a social dialog system to initiate news-related small talk. The NewsTeller system is implemented as a pipeline with four stages: After collecting a large set of potentially relevant news events, a classifier is used to filter out mal- formed events. The remaining events are then ranked ac- cording to a relevance value predicted by a regressor. In a final step, a short summary of the highest-ranked event is generated and returned to the user. Both the classifier and the regressor were evaluated on hand-labeled data sets. In addition to this, a user study was conducted to further validate the system. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach performs significantly better than a random baseline

Using Conceptual Spaces for Artificial Intelligence

This dissertation makes the cognitive framework of conceptual spaces (mainly developed by Peter Gärdenfors) usable for practical applications in cognitive AI by providing a thorough mathematical formalization of the framework along with an open source implementation, by proposing and evaluating a novel hybrid approach for connecting raw sensory information to the conceptual layer of representation, and by discussing various learning mechanisms for identifying conceptual regions. It provides a tight integration of various topics such as cognitive AI, neural-symbolic integration, deep representation learning, multidimensional scaling on psychological dissimilarity ratings, and commonsense reasoning

A Thorough Formalization of Conceptual Spaces

The highly influential framework of conceptual spaces provides a geometric way of representing knowledge. Instances are represented by points in a high-dimensional space and concepts are represented by convex regions in this space. After pointing out a problem with the convexity requirement, we propose a formalization of conceptual spaces based on fuzzy star-shaped sets. Our formalization uses a parametric definition of concepts and extends the original framework by adding means to represent correlations between different domains in a geometric way. Moreover, we define computationally efficient operations on concepts (intersection, union, and projection onto a subspace) and show that these operations can support both learning and reasoning processes