Abstract Semantic Relations in Mind, Brain, and Machines
Thursday, October 1, 2020
16:00 UTC
Prof Keith Holyoak
UCLA
Recording
Open recording
Hosted by Analogical Minds60 minutes
Abstract
Abstract semantic relations (e.g., category membership, part-whole, antonymy, cause-effect) are central to human intelligence, underlying the distinctively human ability to reason by analogy. I will describe a computational project (Bayesian Analogy with Relational Transformations) that aims to extract explicit representations of abstract semantic relations from non-relational inputs automatically generated by machine learning. BART’s representations predict patterns of typicality and similarity for semantic relations, as well as similarity of neural signals triggered by semantic relations during analogical reasoning. In this approach, analogy emerges from the ability to learn and compare relations; mapping emerges later from the ability to compare patterns of relations.
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