Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical framework for knowledge representation and discovery. It performs a hierarchical clustering over a set of objects described by attributes, resulting in conceptual structures in which objects are organized depending on the attributes they share. These conceptual structures naturally highlight commonalities and variabilities among similar objects by categorizing them into groups which are then arranged by similarity, making it particularly appropriate for variability extraction and analysis. Despite the potential of FCA, determining which of its properties can be leveraged for variability-related tasks (and how) is not always straightforward, partly due to the mathematical orientation of its foundational literature. This paper attempts to bridge part of this gap by gathering a selection of properties of the framework which are essential to variability analysis, and how they can be used to interpret diverse variability information within the resulting conceptual structures.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that systems trained solely on text can acquire extensive world knowledge, develop reasoning capabilities, and internalize abstract semantic concepts--showcasing properties that can be associated with general intelligence. This raises an intriguing question: Do such concepts emerge in models trained on other modalities, such as speech? Furthermore, when models are trained jointly on multiple modalities: Do they develop a richer, more structured semantic understanding? To explore this, we analyze the conceptual structures learned by speech and textual models both individually and jointly. We employ Latent Concept Analysis, an unsupervised method for uncovering and interpreting latent representations in neural networks, to examine how semantic abstractions form across modalities. For reproducibility we made scripts and other resources available to the community.

Despite advances in embodied AI, agent reasoning systems still struggle to capture the fundamental conceptual structures that humans naturally use to understand and interact with their environment. To address this, we propose a novel framework that bridges embodied cognition theory and agent systems by leveraging a formal characterization of image schemas, which are defined as recurring patterns of sensorimotor experience that structure human cognition. By customizing LLMs to translate natural language descriptions into formal representations based on these sensorimotor patterns, we will be able to create a neurosymbolic system that grounds the agent's understanding in fundamental conceptual structures. We argue that such an approach enhances both efficiency and interpretability while enabling more intuitive human-agent interactions through shared embodied understanding.

Neural network models of language have long been used as a tool for developing hypotheses about conceptual representation in the mind and brain. For many years, such use involved extracting vector-space representations of words and using distances among these to predict or understand human behavior in various semantic tasks. Contemporary large language models (LLMs), however, make it possible to interrogate the latent structure of conceptual representations using experimental methods nearly identical to those commonly used with human participants. The current work utilizes three common techniques borrowed from cognitive psychology to estimate and compare the structure of concepts in humans and a suite of LLMs. In humans, we show that conceptual structure is robust to differences in culture, language, and method of estimation. Structures estimated from LLM behavior, while individually fairly consistent with those estimated from human behavior, vary much more depending upon the particular task used to generate responses--across tasks, estimates of conceptual structure from the very same model cohere less with one another than do human structure estimates. These results highlight an important difference between contemporary LLMs and human cognition, with implications for understanding some fundamental limitations of contemporary machine language.

In cognitive science, efforts to understand the structure of human concepts have relied on semantic feature norms: participants list all the properties they believe to be true of a given concept; responses are collected from many participants for many concepts; overlap in the resulting feature vectors captures the degree to which concepts are semantically related(Rosch, 1973; McRae et al., 2005). Yet participants often produce only a fraction of what they know for each concept: tigers have DNA, can breathe, and are alive, but these properties are not typically produced in feature norms for tiger. Such omissions are important because they express deep conceptual structure: having DNA and breathing connect tigers to all other plants and animals. To better capture such structure, some studies ask human participants to make yes/no judgments for all possible properties across every concept. Thus if "can breathe" was listed for a single concept, human raters would then evaluate whether each other concept in the dataset can breathe. This verification step significantly enriches the conceptual structure that features norms express (De Deyne et al., 2008), but is exceedingly costly in human labor: the number of verification questions asked increases exponentially with the number of concepts probed. Previous work has shown that the conceptual structure of a large language model (LLM) for semantic feature listing is similar to human conceptual structure (Suresh et al., 2023; Bhatia & Richie, 2022). In this paper we consider whether this step can be reliably "outsourced" to an open sourced LLM optimized for question-answering, specifically the opensource FLAN-T5 XXL model (Chung et al., 2022; Wei et al., 2021), focusing on two questions: (1) How accurately does the LLM capture human responses to the questions?

Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. In recent years, deep learning has taken great strides in some of the most challenging areas of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. However, some problems remain unsolved. Deep learning systems are poor at handling novel situations, they require enormous amounts of data to train, and they sometimes make weird mistakes that confuse even their creators. Some scientists believe these problems will be solved by creating larger and larger neural networks and training them on bigger and bigger datasets.

Computer users today are demanding greater performance from systems that understand and respond intelligently to human language as input. In the past, researchers proposed and built conceptual analysis systems that attempted to understand language in depth by decomposing a text into structures representing complex combinations of primitive acts, events, and state changes in the world the way people conceive them. However, these systems have traditionally been time-consuming and costly to build and maintain by hand. This paper presents two studies of crowdsourcing a parallel corpus to build conceptual analysis systems through machine learning. In the first study, we found that crowdworkers can view simple English sentences built around specific action words, and build conceptual structures that represent decompositions of the meaning of that action word into simple and complex combinations of conceptual primitives. The conceptual structures created by crowdworkers largely agree with a set of gold standard conceptual structures built by experts, but are often missing parts of the gold standard conceptualization. In the second study, we developed and tested a novel method for improving the corpus through a subsequent round of crowdsourcing; In this "refinement" step, we presented only conceptual structures to a second set of crowdworkers, and found that when crowdworkers could identify the action word in the original sentence based only on the conceptual structure, the conceptual structure was a stronger match to the gold standard structure for that sentence. We also calculated a statistically significant correlation between the number of crowdworkers who identified the original action word for a conceptual structure, and the degree of matching between the conceptual structure and a gold standard conceptual structure. This indicates that crowdsourcing may be used not only to generate the conceptual structures, but also to select only those of the highest quality for a parallel corpus linking them to natural language.

Discovering meaningful conceptual structures is a substantial task in data mining and knowledge discovery applications. While off-the-shelf interestingness indices defined in Formal Concept Analysis may provide an effective relevance evaluation in several situations, they frequently give inadequate results when faced with massive formal contexts (and concept lattices), and in the presence of irrelevant concepts. In this paper, we introduce the Conceptual Relevance (CR) score, a new scalable interestingness measurement for the identification of actionable concepts. From a conceptual perspective, the minimal generators provide key information about their associated concept intent. Furthermore, the relevant attributes of a concept are those that maintain the satisfaction of its closure condition. Thus, the guiding idea of CR exploits the fact that minimal generators and relevant attributes can be efficiently used to assess concept relevance. As such, the CR index quantifies both the amount of conceptually relevant attributes and the number of the minimal generators per concept intent. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the efficiency of this measure over the well-known stability index.

This article is a sequel to an article titled "A New Direction in AI -- Toward a Computational Theory of Perceptions," which appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of AI Magazine (volume 22, No. 1, 73-84). The concept of precisiated natural language (PNL) was briefly introduced in that article, and PNL was employed as a basis for computation with perceptions. In what follows, the conceptual structure of PNL is described in greater detail, and PNL's role in knowledge representation, deduction, and concept definition is outlined and illustrated by examples. What should be understood is that PNL is in its initial stages of development and that the exposition that follows is an outline of the basic ideas that underlie PNL rather than a definitive theory. A natural language is basically a system for describing perceptions. Perceptions, such as perceptions of distance, height, weight, color, temperature, similarity, likelihood, relevance, and most other attributes of physical and mental objects are intrinsically imprecise, reflecting the bounded ability of sensory organs, and ultimately the brain, to resolve detail and store information.

Principles of cognitive economy would require that concepts about objects, properties and relations should be introduced only if they simplify the conceptualisation of a domain. Unexpectedly, classic logic conditionals, specifying structures holding within elements of a formal conceptualisation, do not always satisfy this crucial principle. The paper argues that this requirement is captured by \emph{supervenience}, hereby further identified as a property necessary for compression. The resulting theory suggests an alternative explanation of the empirical experiences observable in Wason's selection tasks, associating human performance with conditionals on the ability of dealing with compression, rather than with logic necessity.