General knowledge acquisition entails the extraction of statistical regularities from the environment. At high levels of complexity, this may involve the extraction, and consolidation, of associative regularities across event memories. The underlying neural mechanisms would likely involve a hippocampo-neocortical dialog, as proposed previously for system-level consolidation. To test these hypot...

An important element of learning from examples is the extraction of patterns and regularities from data. This paper investigates the structure of patterns in data defined over discrete features, i.e. features with two or more qualitatively distinct values. Any such pattern can be algebraically decomposed into a spectrum of component patterns, each of which is a simpler or more atomic ‘‘regulari...

Do statistical regularities between pronouns and verbs help children learn verb meanings? This question is addressed by an analysis of child directed speech. The results show that there are statistical regularities in the co-occurrences of pronouns and verbs that could be used to cue verbs that describe physical motion, psychological states, and features such as transitivity. The learnability o...

Machine learning typically involves discovering regularities in a training set, then applying these learned regularities to classify objects in a test set. In this paper we present an approach to discovering additional regularities in the test set, and show that in relational domains such test set regularities can be used to improve classification accuracy beyond that achieved using the trainin...

This article proposes a new formal model for the analysis of texts, particularly adapted to the study of verbalizations. The model has been built to characterize individual regularities between texts written by the same author. Its purpose is to provide a precise definition of the notions of linguistic and cognitive styles. It includes two levels : at the enunciative level, lexical and syntacti...

The historical sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, appear to have no means to test hypotheses. However, on closer examination, reasoning in the historical sciences relies upon regularities, regularities that can be tested. I outline the role of regularities in the historical sciences, and in the process, blur the distinction between the historical sciences and the ...