Learning Concepts by Asking Questions

Tw o important issues in machine learning are explored: the role that memory plays in acquiring new concepts; and the extent to which the learner can take an active part in acquiring these concepts. This chapter describes a program, called Marvin, which uses concepts it has learned previously to learn new concepts. The program forms hypotheses about the concept being learned and tests the hypotheses by asking the trainer questions. Learning begins when the trainer shows Marvin an example of the concept to be learned. The program determines which objects in the example belong to concepts stored in the memory. A description of the new concept is formed by using the information obtained from the memory to generalize the description of the training example. The generalized description is tested when the program constructs new examples and shows these to the trainer, asking if they belong to the target concept.