Over the last decade technological advances have been made which enable us to envision real-world applications of speech technologies. It is possible to foresee applications, for example, information centers in public places such as train stations and airports, where the spoken query is to be recognized without even prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Other applications may require ac...

We consider the application of symbolic learning in natural domains. Given a conceptualization of the domain in terms of a particular set of predicates, we consider how knowledge about the domain can constrain learning. In particular, by specifying a set of predicates which are not allowed to vary within a category we restrict the set of possible categories. We suggest that such constraints ari...