Asymmetric Hybrids: Dialogues for Computational Concept Combination (Extended Abstract) (original) (raw)
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Asymmetric Hybrids: Dialogues for Computational Concept Combination
2021
When people combine concepts these are often characterised as “hybrid”, “impossible”, or “humorous”. However, when simply considering them in terms of extensional logic, the novel concepts understood as a conjunctive concept will often lack meaning having an empty extension (consider “a tooth that is a chair”, “a pet flower”, etc.). Still, people use different strategies to produce new non-empty concepts: additive or integrative combination of features, alignment of features, instantiation, etc. All these strategies involve the ability to deal with conflicting attributes and the creation of new (combinations of) properties. We here consider in particular the case where a Head concept has superior ‘asymmetric’ control over steering the resulting concept combination (or hybridisation) with a Modifier concept. Specifically, we propose a dialogical approach to concept combination and discuss an implementation based on axiom weakening, which models the cognitive and logical mechanics of ...
E pluribus unum: Formalisation, Use-Cases, and Computational Support for Conceptual Blending
2014
Conceptual blending has been employed very successfully to understand the process of concept invention, studied particularly within cognitive psychology and linguistics. However, despite this influential research, within computational cre-ativity little effort has been devoted to fully formalise these ideas and to make them amenable to computational techniques. Unlike other combination techniques, blend-ing aims at creatively generating (new) concepts on the basis of input theories whose domains are thematically distinct but whose specifications share structural similarity based on a relation of analogy, identified in a generic space, the base ontology. We here introduce the basic formalisation of conceptual blending, as sketched by the late Joseph Goguen, and discuss some of its variations. We illustrate the vast array of conceptual blends that may be covered by this approach and discuss the theoret-ical and conceptual challenges that ensue. Moreover, we show how the Distributed On...
Towards a cognitive model of conceptual blending
2010
We outline a way to use Goguen's (2006) account of conceptual blending in the cognitive architecture ACT-R. Despite recent advances in linguistics and general accounts of conceptual blending (for example, Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 2008) it has received scant attention in cognitive modelling, which is partly due to the fact that there are hardly any computational accounts of this phenomenon, Goguen's being one of them.
Emergent attributes in combined concepts
1997
The aim of this chapter is to review recent evidence on the creative processes involved when concepts are combined in conjunctions. Shoben and Wisniewski (each in this volume) have written about their research into a particularly interesting form of conceptual combination, namely noun-noun and adjective-noun modification in English. Many of these combinations are" non-predicating" in the simple sense that the combined concept does not refer to a category formed by the conjunction of the two constituent concept categories.
Against hybrid theories of concepts
Anthropology & Philosophy
Psychologists of concepts' traditional assumption that there are many properties common to all concepts has been subject to devastating critiques in psychology and in the philosophy of psychology. However, it is currently unclear what approach to concepts is best suited to replace this traditional assumption. In this article, we compare two competing approaches, the Heterogeneity Hypothesis and the hybrid theories of concepts, and we present an empirical argument that supports the former over the latter.
Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2011
This study looks at how combinations of two French nouns are interpreted. The order of occurrence of the constituents of two types of conceptual combinations, relation and property, was manipulated in view of determining how property-based and relation-based interpretations evolve with age. Three groups of French-speaking children (ages 6, 8, and 10) and a group of adults performed an interpretation-selection task. The results for the children indicated that while property-based interpretations increased with age, relation-based interpretations were in the majority for both combination types, whereas for the adults, relation-based interpretations were in the minority for property combinations. For the children and adults alike, the most frequent interpretations were ones in which the head noun came first and was followed by the modifier (the opposite of the order observed for English).
Context and structure in conceptual combination
Cognitive Psychology, 1988
Three experiments evaluated modifications of conceptual knowledge associated with judgments of adjective-noun conceptual combinations. Existing models, such as the Smith and Osherson modification model, assume that the changes associated with understanding an adjective noun combination are confined to the corresponding adjectival dimension. Our experiments indicate that this assumption is too strong. The first study found that naming one dimension affects correlated dimensions. For example, participants judge small spoons to be more typical spoons than large spoons, but for wooden spoons, large spoons are more typical than small spoons. The second study demonstrated that the similarity of adjectives is not independent of the noun context in which they appear. For example, white and gray are judged to be more similar than gray and black in the context of hair but this judgment reverses in the context of clouds. The third study showed that a property equally true (or false) for two concepts may be more central to one concept than the other (e.g., it is more important that boomerangs be curved than that bananas be curved). These results pose serious problems for current theories of how people combine concepts. We propose instead that we need richer views of both the conceptual structure and the modifications of it required by conceptual combination. We suggest that theoretical knowledge and the construct of centrality of meaning may play useful roles. 0 1988 Academic Press. Inc.