Categorization Versus Logic in Category Conjunction: Towards a Model of Overextension

May 2004

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

Volume

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

All Papers

Traditional approaches to semantics give a logical, settheoretic account of category conjunction, where an item is a member of a conjunction A&B only if it is a member of both single categories A and B. However, people do not always follow this logical approach when classifying items in conjunctions. For example, Hampton (1988) found that people typically classify blackboards as non-members of the single category “furniture”, but as members of the conjunction “school furniture”. This paper describes a computational model intended to explain this “overextension” of conjunctive categories, and an experiment testing this model using conjunctions of controlled, laboratory-learned categories.