Categories and Instances in Human Cognition and AI

Turning regularities into categories is an important aspect of human cognition. We can make generalizations about new events and entities based on the categories we think they belong to. Structuring knowledge into categories also facilitate search and retrieval. Moreover, remembering specific instances of categories (e.g., the first day at a job) is crucial for how we process information. Similarly, artificial intelligence systems require the capacity to represent and reason about both categories and instances. In this talk, I describe two tasks inspired by experiments in developmental psychology for evaluating this capacity. The first task, novel noun generalization, examines whether our existing models can determine the correct level of a hierarchical taxonomy (e.g., dog or animal) a novel word refers to. The second task evaluates models' ability to represent different states of the world (i.e., the position of an item). I discuss how current models perform on these tasks and what inductive biases can help models succeed.

To attend the seminar, please contact Rachid Riad: riadrachid3@gmail.com

This seminar aims to open that dialogue between the fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Speakers may come from one field or the other, but all will use this opportunity to reflect on how a pairing between the two fields can be stronger than the sum of the parts. 

More info here