Concept Formation and Knowledge Revision

Stefan Wrobel

A fundamental assumption of work in artificial intelligence and machine learning is that knowledge is expressed in a computer with the help of knowledge representations. Since the proper choice of such representations is a difficult task that fundamentally affects the capabilities of a system, the problem of automatic representation change is an important topic in current research. Concept Formation and Knowledge Revision focuses on representation change as a concept formation task, regarding concepts as the elementary representational vocabulary from which further statements are constructed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach from psychological foundations to computer implementations, the book draws on existing psychological results about the nature of human concepts and concept formation to determine the scope of concept formation phenomena, and to identify potential components of...