=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Typicality-Based Inference by Plugging Conceptual Spaces Into Ontologies
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1100/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1100
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aiia/GhignoneLR13
}}
==Typicality-Based Inference by Plugging Conceptual Spaces Into Ontologies==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1100/paper6.pdf
Typicality-Based Inference by Plugging
Conceptual Spaces Into Ontologies
Leo Ghignone, Antonio Lieto, and Daniele P. Radicioni
Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, Italy
{lieto,radicion}@di.unito.it
leo.ghignone@gmail.com
Abstract. In this paper we present a cognitively inspired system for
the representation of conceptual information in an ontology-based envi-
ronment. It builds on the heterogeneous notion of concepts in Cognitive
Science and on the so-called dual process theories of reasoning and ra-
tionality, and it provides a twofold view on the same artificial concept,
combining a classical symbolic component (grounded on a formal on-
tology) with a typicality-based one (grounded on the conceptual spaces
framework). The implemented system has been tested in a pilot experi-
mentation regarding the classification task of linguistic stimuli. The re-
sults show that this modeling solution extends the representational and
reasoning “conceptual” capabilities of standard ontology-based systems.
1 Introduction
Representing and reasoning on common sense concepts is still an open issue in
the field of knowledge engineering and, more specifically, in that of formal on-
tologies. In Cognitive Science evidences exist in favor of prototypical concepts,
and typicality-based conceptual reasoning has been widely studied. Conversely,
in the field of computational models of cognition, most contemporary concept
oriented knowledge representation (KR) systems, including formal ontologies, do
not allow –for technical convenience– neither the representation of concepts in
prototypical terms nor forms of approximate, non monotonic, conceptual reason-
ing. In this paper we focus on the problem of concept representation in the field
of formal ontologies and we introduce, following the approach proposed in [1], a
cognitively inspired system to extend the representational and reasoning capa-
bilities of the ontology based systems.
The study of concept representation concerns different research areas, such
as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, etc.. In the field of Cog-
nitive Science, the early work of Rosch [2] showed that ordinary concepts do not
obey the classical theory (stating that concepts can be defined in terms of sets
of necessary and sufficient conditions). Rather, they exhibit prototypical traits:
e.g., some members of a category are considered better instances than other ones;
more central instances share certain typical features –such as the ability of fly-
ing for birds– that, in general, cannot be thought of as necessary nor sufficient
conditions. These results influenced pioneering KR research, where some efforts
were invested in trying to take into account the suggestions coming from Cogni-
tive Psychology: artificial systems were designed –e.g., frames [3]– to represent
and to conduct reasoning on concepts in “non classical”, prototypical terms [4].
However, these systems lacked in clear formal semantics, and were later sac-
rificed in favor of a class of formalisms stemmed from structured inheritance
semantic networks: the first system in this line of research was the KL-ONE
system [5]. These formalisms are known today as description logics (DLs). In
this setting, the representation of prototypical information (and therefore the
possibility of performing non monotonic reasoning) is not allowed,1 since the
formalisms in this class are primarily intended for deductive, logical inference.
Nowadays, DLs are largely adopted in diverse application areas, in particular
within the area of ontology representation. For example, OWL and OWL 2 for-
malisms follow this tradition,2 which has been endorsed by the W3C for the
development of the Semantic Web. However, under a historical perspective, the
choice of preferring classical systems based on a well defined –Tarskian-like– se-
mantics left unsolved the problem of representing concepts in prototypical terms.
Although in the field of logic oriented KR various fuzzy and non-monotonic ex-
tensions of DL formalisms have been designed to deal with some aspects of
“non-classical” concepts, nonetheless various theoretical and practical problems
remain unsolved [6].
As a possible way out, we follow the proposal presented in [1], that relies
on two main cornerstones: the dual process theory of reasoning and rational-
ity [7,8,9], and the heterogeneous approach to the concepts in Cognitive Sci-
ence [10]. This paper has the following major elements of interest: i) we provided
the hybrid architecture envisioned in [1] with a working implementation; ii) we
show how the resulting system is able to perform a simple form of categoriza-
tion, that would be unfeasible by using only formal ontologies; iii) we a propose
a novel access strategy (different from that outlined in [1]) to the conceptual
information, closer to the tenets of the dual process approach (more about this
point later on).
The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 we illustrate the general
architecture and the main features of the implemented system. In Section 3 we
provide the results of a preliminary experimentation to test inference in the
proposed approach, and, finally, we conclude by presenting the related work
(Section 4) and by outlining future work (Section 5).
2 The System
A system has been implemented to explore the hypothesis of the hybrid con-
ceptual architecture. To test it, we have been considering a basic inference task:
given an input description in natural language, the system should be able to find,
1
This is the case, for example, of exceptions to the inheritance mechanism.
2
For the Web Ontology Language, see http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ and
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/, respectively.
even for typicality based description (that is, most of common sense descrip-
tions), the corresponding concept category by combining ontological inference
and typicality based one. To these ends, we developed a domain ontology (the
naive animal ontology, illustrated below) and a parallel typicality description as
a set of domains in a conceptual space framework [11].
In the following, i) we first outline the design principles that drove the devel-
opment of the system; ii) we then provide an overview of the system architecture
and of its components and features; iii) we elaborate on the inference task, pro-
viding the detailed control strategy; and finally iv) we introduce the domain
ontology and the conceptual space used as case study applied over the restricted
domain of animals.
2.1 Background and architecture design
The theoretical framework known as dual process theory postulates the co-
existence of two different types of cognitive systems. The systems3 of the first
type (type 1) are phylogenetically older, unconscious, automatic, associative,
parallel and fast. The systems of the second type (type 2) are more recent,
conscious, sequential and slow, and featured by explicit rule following [7,8,9].
According to the reasons presented in [12,1], the conceptual representation of
our systems should be equipped with two major sorts of components, based on:
– type 1 processes, to perform fast and approximate categorization by taking
advantage from prototypical information associated to concepts;
– type 2 processes, involved in complex inference tasks and that do not take
into account the representation of prototypical knowledge.
Another theoretical framework inspiring our system regards the heteroge-
neous approach to the concepts in Cognitive Science, according to which con-
cepts do not constitute a unitary element (see [10]).
Our system is equipped, then, with a hybrid conceptual architecture based
on a classical component and on a typical component, each encoding a specific
reasoning mechanism as in the dual process perspective. Figure 1 shows the
general architecture of the hybrid conceptual representation.
The ontological component is based on a classical representation grounded
on a DL formalism, and it allows specifying the necessary and/or sufficient con-
ditions for concept definition. For example, if we consider the concept water,
the classical component will contain the information that water is exactly the
chemical substance whose formula is H2 O, i.e., the substance whose molecules
have two hydrogen atoms with a covalent bond to the single oxygen atom. On
the other hand, the prototypical facet of the concept will grasp its prototypical
traits, such as the fact that water occurring in liquid state is usually a colorless,
odorless and tasteless fluid.
3
We assume that each system type can be composed by many sub-systems and pro-
cesses.
Representation of
Concept X
system 1 system 2
hasComponent hasComponent
Non
Monotonic
Monotonic
Reasoning
Reasoning
Typical Classical
representation of X representation of X
Exemplar and
prototype-based Ontology-based
categorization categorization
Fig. 1: Architecture of the hybrid system.
By adopting the “dual process” notation, in our system the representational
and reasoning functions are assigned to the system 1 (executing processes of
type 1), and they are associated to the Conceptual Spaces framework [11]. Both
from a modeling and from a reasoning point of view, system 1 is compliant
with the traits of conceptual typicality. On the other hand, the representational
and reasoning functions assigned to the system 2 (executing processes of type
2) are associated to a classical DL-based ontological representation. Differently
from what proposed in [1], the access to the information stored and processed
in both components is assumed to proceed from the system 1 to the system 2,
as suggested by the central arrow in Figure 1.
We now briefly introduce the representational frameworks upon which system
1 (henceforth S1) and system 2 (henceforth S2) have been designed.
As mentioned, the aspects related to the typical conceptual component S1
are modeled through Conceptual Spaces [11]. Conceptual spaces (CS) are a ge-
ometrical framework for the representation of knowledge, consisting in a set of
quality dimensions. In some cases, such dimensions can be directly related to per-
ceptual mechanisms; examples of this kind are temperature, weight, brightness,
pitch. In other cases, dimensions can be more abstract in nature. A geometri-
cal (topological or metrical) structure is associated to each quality dimension.
The chief idea is that knowledge representation can benefit from the geometrical
structure of conceptual spaces: instances are represented as points in a space,
and their similarity can be calculated in the terms of their distance according to
some suitable distance measure. In this setting, concepts correspond to regions,
and regions with different geometrical properties correspond to different kinds
of concepts. Conceptual spaces are suitable to represent concepts in “typical”
terms, since the regions representing concepts have soft boundaries. In many
cases typicality effects can be represented in a straightforward way: for example,
in the case of concepts, corresponding to convex regions of a conceptual space,
prototypes have a natural geometrical interpretation, in that they correspond
to the geometrical centre of the region itself. Given a convex region, we can
provide each point with a certain centrality degree, that can be interpreted as a
measure of its typicality. Moreover, single exemplars correspond to single points
in the space. This allows us to consider both the exemplar and the prototypical
accounts of typicality (further details can be found in [13, p. 9]).
On the other hand, the representation of the classical component S2 has been
implemented based on a formal ontology. As already pointed out, the standard
ontological formalisms leave unsolved the problem of representing prototypical
information. Furthermore, it is not possible to execute non monotonic inference,
since classical ontology-based reasoning mechanisms simply contemplate deduc-
tive processes.
2.2 Inference in the hybrid system
Categorization (i.e., to classify a given data instance into a predefined set of cate-
gories) is one of the classical processes automatically performed both by symbolic
and sub-symbolic artificial systems. In our system categorization is based on a
two-step process involving both the typical and the classical component of the
conceptual representation. These components account for different types of cate-
gorization: approximate or non monotonic (performed on the conceptual spaces),
and classical or monotonic (performed on the ontology). Different from classical
ontological inference, in fact, categorization in conceptual spaces proceeds from
prototypical values. In turn, prototypical values need not be specified for all class
individuals, that vice versa can overwrite them: one typical example is the case
of birds that (by default) fly, except for special birds, like penguins, that do not
fly.
The whole categorization process regarding our system can be summarized
as follows. The system takes in input a textual description d and produces in
output a pair of categories hc0 , cci, the output of S1 and S2, respectively. The
S1 component takes in input the information extracted from the description d,
and produces in output a set of classes C = {c1 , c2 , . . . , cn }. This set of results
is then checked against cc, the output of S2 (Algorithm 1, line 3): the step
is performed by adding to the ontology an individual from the class ci ∈ C,
modified by the information extracted from d, and by checking the consistency
of the newly added element with a DL reasoner.
If the S2 system classifies it as consistent with the ontology, then the classi-
fication succeeded and the category provided by S2 (cc) is returned along with
c0 , the top scoring class returned by S1 (Algorithm 1: line 8). If cc –the class
computed by S2– is a superclass or a subclass of one of those identified by S1
(ci ), both cc and c0 are returned (Algorithm 1: line 11). Thus, if S2 provides
more specific output, we follow a specificity heuristics; otherwise, the output of
S2 is returned, following the rationale that it is safer.4 If all results in C are
4
The output of S2 cannot be wrong on a purely logical perspective, in that it is
the result of a deductive process. The control strategy tries to implement a tradeoff
between ontological inference and the output of S1, which is more informative but
also less reliable from a formal point of view. However, in next future we plan to
explore different conciliation mechanisms to ground the overall control strategy.
Algorithm 1 Inference in the hybrid system.
input : textual description d
output : a class assignment, as computed by S1 and S2
1: C ← S1(d) /* conceptual spaces output */
2: for each ci ∈ C do
3: cc ← S2(hd, ci i) /* ontology based output */
4: if cc == NULL then
5: continue /* inconsistency detected */
6: end if
7: if cc equals ci then
8: return hc0 , cci
9: else
10: if cc is subclass or superclass of ci then
11: return hc0 , cci
12: end if
13: end if
14: end for
15: cc ← S2(hd, Thingi)
16: return hc0 , cci
inconsistent with those computed by S2, a pair of classes is returned including
c0 and the output of S2 having for actual parameters d and Thing, the meta
class of all the classes in the ontological formalism.
2.3 Developing the Ontology
A formal ontology has been developed describing the animal kingdom. It has
been devised to meet common sense intuitions, rather than reflecting the pre-
cise taxonomic knowledge of ethologists, so we denote it as naı̈ve animal ontol-
ogy.5 In particular, the ontology contains the taxonomic distinctions that have
an intuitive counterpart in the way human beings categorize the correspond-
ing concepts. Classes are collapsed at a granularity level such that they can be
naturally grouped together also based on their accessibility [14]. For example,
although the category pachyderm is no longer in use by ethologists, we created
a pachyderm class that is superclass to elephant, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros.
The underlying rationale is that it is still in use by non experts, due to the
intuitive resemblances among its subclasses.
The ontology is linked to DOLCE’s Lite version;6 in particular, the tree con-
taining our taxonomy is rooted in the agentive-physical-object class, while the
body components are set under biological-physical-object, and partitioned be-
tween the two disjunct classes head-part (e.g., for framing horns, antennas, fang,
etc.) and body-part (e.g., for paws, tails, etc.). The biological-object class in-
5
The ontology is available at the URL http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion/
datasets/aic_13/Naive_animal_ontology.owl
6
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DOLCE-Lite.owl
cludes different sorts of skins (such as fur, plumage, scales), substances produced
and eaten by animals (e.g., milk, wool, poison and fruits, leaves and seeds).
2.4 Formalizing conceptual spaces and distance metrics
The conceptual space defines a metric space that can be used to compute the
proximity of the input entities to prototypes. To compute the distance between
two points p1 , p2 we apply a distance metrics based on the combination of the
Euclidean distance and the angular distance intervening between the points.
Namely, we use Euclidean metrics to compute within-domain distance, while for
dimensions from different domains we use the Manhattan distance metrics, as
suggested in [11,15]. Weights assigned to domain dimensions are affected by the
context, too, so the resulting weighted Euclidean distance distE is computed as
follows v
u n
uX
distE (p1 , p2 , k) = t wi (p1,i − p2,i )2 ,
i=1
where i varies over the n domain dimensions, k is the context, and wi are di-
mension weights.
The representation format adopted in conceptual spaces (e.g., for the concept
whale) includes information such as:
02062744n,whale,dimension(x=350,y=350,z=2050),color(B=20,H=20,S=60),food=10
that is, the WordNet synset identifier, the lemma of the concept in the de-
scription, information about its typical dimensions, color (as the position of the
instance on the three-dimensional axes of brightness, hue and saturation) and
food. Of course, information about typical traits varies according to the species.
Three domains with multiple dimensions have been defined:7 size, color and
habitat. Each quality in a domain is associated to a range of possible values.
To avoid that larger ranges affect too much the distance, we have introduced a
damping factor to reduce this effect; also, the relative strength of each domain
can be parametrized.
We represent points as vectors (with as many dimensions as required by
the considered domain), whose components correspond to the point coordinates,
so that a natural metrics to compute the similarity between them is cosine
similarity. Cosine similarity is computed as the cosine of the angle between the
considered vectors: two vectors with same orientation have a cosine similarity 1,
while two orthogonal vectors have cosine similarity 0. The normalized version of
cosine similarity (cs),
ˆ also accounting for the above weights wi and context k is
computed as
Pn
i=1 wi (p1,i × p2,i )
cs(p
ˆ 1 , p2 , k) = pPn pPn .
2 2
i=1 wi (p1,i ) × i=1 wi (p2,i )
7
We defined also further domains with one dimension (e.g., whiskers, wings, paws,
fang, and so forth), but for our present concerns they are of less interest. The concep-
tual space is available at the URL http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion/datasets/
aic_13/conceptual_space.txt.
Moreover, to satisfy the triangle inequality is a requirement upon distance in a
metric space; unfortunately, cosine similarity does not satisfy triangle inequality,
so we adopt a slightly different metrics, the angular similarity (as),
ˆ whose values
vary over the range [0, 1], and that is defined as
2 · cos−1 · cs(p
ˆ 1 , p2 , k)
ˆ 1 , p2 ) = 1 −
as(p .
π
Angular distance allows us to compare the shape of animals disregarding their
actual size: for example, it allows us to find that a python is similar to a viper
even though it is much bigger.
In the metric space being defined, the distance d between individuals ia , ib is
computed with the Manhattan distance, enriched with information about con-
text k that indicates the set of weights associated to each domain. Additionally,
the relevance of domains with fewer dimensions (that would obtain overly high
weights) is counterbalanced by a normalizing factor (based on the work by [15]),
so that such distance is computed as:
m
X q
d(ia , ib , K) = wj · |Dj | · distE (pj (ia ), pj (ib ), kj ) , (1)
j=1
where K is the whole context, containing domain weights wj and contexts kj ,
and |Dj | is the number of dimensions in each domain.
In this setting, the distance between each two concepts can be computed
as the distance between two regions in a given domain, and then to combining
them through the Formula 1. Also, we can compute the distance between any
two region prototypes, or the minimal distance between their individuals, or we
can apply more sophisticated algorithms: in all cases, we have designed a metric
space and procedures that allow characterizing and comparing concepts herein.
Although angular distance is currently applied to compute similarity in the size
of the considered individuals, it can be generalized to further dimensions.
3 Experimentation
The evaluation consisted of an inferential task aimed at categorizing a set of lin-
guistic descriptions. Such descriptions contain information related to concepts
typical features. Some examples of these common-sense descriptions are: “the
big carnivore with black and yellow stripes” denoting the concept of tiger, and
“the sweet water fish that goes upstream” denoting the concept of salmon, and
so on. A dataset of 27 “common-sense” linguistic descriptions was built, contain-
ing a list of stimuli and their corresponding category: this is the “prototypically
correct” category, and in the following is referred to as the expected result.8 The
set of stimuli was devised by a team of neuropsychologists and philosophers in
8
The full list is available at the URL http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion/
datasets/aic_13/stimuli_en.txt.
Table 1: Results of the preliminary experimentation.
Test cases categorized 27 100.0%
[ 1.] Cases where S1 and S2 returned the same category 24 88.9%
[2a.] Cases where S1 returned the expected category 25 92.6%
[2b.] Cases where S2 returned the expected category 26 96.3%
Cases where S1 OR S2 returned the expected category 27 100.0%
the frame of a broader project, aimed at investigating the role of visual load in
concepts involved in inferential and referential tasks. Such input was used for
querying the system as in a typicality based question-answering task. In Infor-
mation Retrieval such queries are known to belong to the class of “informational
queries”, i.e., queries where the user intends to obtain information regarding a
specific information need. Since it is characterized by uncertain and/or incom-
plete information, this class of queries is by far the most common and complex to
interpret, if compared to queries where users can search for the URL of a given
site (‘navigational queries’), or look for sites where some task can be performed,
like buying music files (‘transactional queries’) [16].
We devised some metrics to assess the accuracy of the system, and namely
we recorded the following information:
1. how often S1 and S2 returned in output the same category;
2. in case different outputs were returned, the accuracy obtained by S1 and
S2:
2a. the accuracy of S1. This figure is intended to measure how often the top
ranked category c0 returned by S1 is the same as that expected.
2b. the accuracy of S2, that is the second category returned in the output
pair hc· , cci. This figure is intended to measure how often the cc category
is the appropriate one w.r.t. the expected result. We remark that cc has
not been necessarily computed by starting from c0 : in principle any ci ∈ C
might have been used (see also Algorithm 1, lines 3 and 15).
The results obtained in this preliminary experimentation are presented in Ta-
ble 1. All of the stimuli were categorized, although not all of them were correctly
categorized. However, the system was able to correctly categorize a vast majority
of the input descriptions: in most cases (92.6%) S1 alone produces the correct
output, with considerable saving in terms of computation time and resources.
Conversely, none of the concepts (except for one) described with typical features
would have been classified through classical ontological inference. It is in virtue
of the former access to conceptual spaces that the whole system is able to cate-
gorize such descriptions. Let us consider, e.g., the description “The animal that
eats bananas”. The ontology encodes knowledge stating that monkeys are omni-
vore. However, since the information that usually monkeys eat bananas cannot
be represented therein, the description would be consistent to all omnivores. The
information returned would then be too informative w.r.t. the granularity of the
expected answer.
Another interesting result was obtained for the input description “the big
herbivore with antlers”. In this case, the correct answer is the third element in
the list C returned by S1; but thanks to the categorization performed by S2, it
is returned in the final output pair (see Algorithm 1, line 8).
Finally, the system revealed to be able to categorize stimuli with typical,
though ontologically incoherent, descriptions. As an example of such a case we
will consider the categorization results obtained with the following stimulus:
“The big fish that eats plankton”. In this case the prototypical answer expected
is whale. However, whales properly are mammals, not fishes. In our hybrid sys-
tem, S1 component returns whale by resorting to prototypical knowledge. If fur-
ther details were added to the input description, the answer would have changed
accordingly: in this sense the categorization performed by S1 is non monotonic
in nature. When then C (the output of S1) is checked against the ontology as
described by the Algorithm 1 at lines 7–13, and an inconsistency is detected,9
the consistency of the second result in C (shark in this example) is tested against
the ontology. Since this answer is an ontologically compliant categorization, then
this solution is returned by the S2 component. The final output of the catego-
rization is then the pair hwhale, sharki: the first element, prototypically relevant
for the query, would have not been provided by querying a classical ontologi-
cal representation. Moreover, if the ontology recorded the information that also
other fishes do eat plankton, the output of a classical ontological inference would
have included them, too, thereby resulting in a too large set of results w.r.t. the
intended answer.
4 Related work
In the context of a different field of application, a solution similar to the one
adopted here has been proposed in [17]. The main difference with their proposal
concerns the underlying assumption on which the integration between symbolic
and sub-symbolic system is based. In our system the conceptual spaces and the
classical component are integrated at the level of the representation of concepts,
and such components are assumed to carry different –though complementary-
conceptual information. On the other hand, the previous proposal is mainly used
to interpret and ground raw data coming from sensor in a high level symbolic
system through the mediation of conceptual spaces.
In other respects, our system is also akin to that ones developed in the field of
the computational approach to the above mentioned dual process theories. A first
example of such “dual based systems” is the mReasoner model [18], developed
with the aim of providing a computational architecture of reasoning based on the
mental models theory proposed by Philip Johnson-Laird [19]. The mReasoner
architecture is based on three components: a system 0, a system 1 and a system
2. The last two systems correspond to those hypothesized by the dual process
approach. System 0 operates at the level of linguistic pre-processing. It parses
9
This follows by observing that c0 = whale, cc = shark; and whale ⊂ mammal, while
shark ⊂ fish; and mammal and fish are disjoint.
the premises of an argument by using natural language processing techniques,
and it then creates an initial intensional model of them. System 1 uses this in-
tensional representation to build an extensional model, and uses heuristics to
provide rapid reasoning conclusions; finally, system 2 carries out more demand-
ing processes to searches for alternative models, if the initial conclusion does
not hold or if it is not satisfactory. Another system that is close to our present
work has been proposed by [20]. The authors do not explicitly mention the dual
process approach; however, they build a system for conversational agents (chat-
bots) where agents’ background knowledge is represented using both a symbolic
and a subsymbolic approach. They also associate different sorts of representation
to different types of reasoning. Namely, deterministic reasoning is associated to
symbolic (system 2) representations, and associative reasoning is accounted for
by the subsymbolic (system 1) component. Differently from our system, how-
ever, the authors do not make any claim about the sequence of activation and
the conciliation strategy of the two representational and reasoning processes. It is
worth noting that other examples of this type of systems can be considered that
are in some sense akin to the dual process proposal: for example, many hybrid,
symbolic-connectionist systems –including cognitive architectures such as, for ex-
ample, CLARION (http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun/clarion.html)–, in
which the connectionist component is used to model fast, associative processes,
while the symbolic component is responsible for explicit, declarative computa-
tions (for a deeper discussion, please refer to [21]). However, at the best of our
knowledge, our system is the only one that considers this hybridization with a
granularity at the level of individual conceptual representations.
5 Conclusions and future work
In this paper we presented a cognitively inspired system to extend the represen-
tational and reasoning capabilities of classical ontological representations. We
tested it in a pilot study concerning a categorization task involving typicality
based queries. The results show that the proposed architecture effectively extends
the reasoning and representational capabilities of formal ontologies towards the
domain of prototype theory.
Next steps will be to complete the implementation of current system: first,
we will work to the automatization of the Information Extraction from linguistic
descriptions, and then to the automatization of the mapping of the extracted
information onto the conceptual representations in S1 and S2. In near future we
will also extend the coverage of the implemented system to further domains.
Yet, we are designing a learning setting to modify weights in conceptual
spaces according to experience (thereby qualifying the whole system as a su-
pervised learning one). This line of research will require the contribution of
theoretical and experimental psychologists, to provide insightful input to the de-
velopment of the system, and experimental corroboration to its evolving facets,
as well. Future work will also include the evaluation of the system on web data,
namely to experiment by using search engine web logs, in order to verify whether
and to what extent the implemented system matches the actual users’ informa-
tional needs.
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