Publications & Technical Reports | |
R244 | |
Using the Language of Thought
Eyal Dechter
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Abstract
In this thesis, I develop and explore two novel models of how humans might be able
to acquire high-level conceputal knowledge by performing probabilistic inference over
a language of thought (Fodor 1975) – a space of symbolic and compositional mental
representations sufficiently expressive to capture the meanings of human thoughts
and utterances. These models and their associated learning algorithms are moti-
vated by an attempt to provide an understanding of the algorithmic principles that
might underlie a child’s ability to search the haystack of sentences in her language of
thought to find the needle that corresponds to any specific concept. The first model
takes advantage of the compositionality inherent to LOT representations, framing
concept acquisition as program induction in a functional programming language; the
Exploration-Compression algorithm this model motivates iteratively builds a library
of useful program fragments that, when composed, restructures the search space,
making more useful programs shorter and easier to find. The second model, the Infi-
nite Knowledge Base Model (IKM), frames concept learning as probabilistic inference
over the space of relational knowledge bases; the algorithm I develop for learning in
this model frames this inference problem as a state-space search over abductive proofs
of the learner’s observed data. This framing allows us to take advantage of powerful
techniques from the heuristic search and classical planning literature to guide the
learner. In the final part of this thesis, I explore the behavior of the IKM on several
case studies of intuitive theories from the concept learning literature, and I discuss
evidence for and against it with respect to other approaches to LOT models.
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