This paper describes how even a simple matcher, if it can detect simple relationships between statements in the knowledge base, will support many features that will make a knowledgebased consultation system appear to behave more intelligently. We describe three features that are useful during the knowledge acquisition phase (involving the building and testing of the knowledge base), and four fe...

We have been developing techniques for extracting general world knowledge from miscellaneous texts by a process of approximate interpretation and abstraction, focusing initially on the Brown corpus. We apply interpretive rules to clausal patterns and patterns of modification, and concurrently abstract general “possibilistic” propositions from the resulting formulas. Two examples are “A person m...

In this paper we describe corporate memory which can support multiple knowledge acquisition, organization and maintenance tools. Memory holds and manages documents and related information and knowledge processed and created by such tools. Tools can work with several types of data such as documents, data in relational database and semantic data. Such diversity of information is needed due to dif...

Although constraints are useful to express semantic restrictions on object structures, Java provides little support for their implementation and evaluation. We argue that constraints should be specified explicitly, and propose a set of design patterns for the representation of constraints on JavaBeans. Object-oriented reflection is used to evaluate these constraints at run-time. We show how thi...

In previous studies, causal contingencies have been suggested to play an important role in causality judgments. However, little is known about how children might use causal contingencies to inform their judgments of causality, especially under uncertainty. In the current study, we found that young children are sensitive to both conditional and unconditional causal contingencies. Furthermore, ch...

An object learning system for image understanding is proposed in this paper. The knowledge acquisition system is designed as a supervised learning task. Therefore, the role of the user as teacher of the system is emphasized, which allows to obtain the object description as well as to select the best recognition strategy for each specific object. An object description is acquired by considering ...

Microstructures of Learning: Novel methods and approaches for assessing structural and functional changes underlying knowledge acquisition in the brain The HuMeNS (Humanities, Medicine, Natural science, Social sciences) Advanced Study Group at Pufendorf Institute, Lund University is conducting an interdisciplinary research program involving collaboration between linguistics, neuroscientists, ph...