Beyond Boolean logic: exploring representation languages for learning complex concepts

Abstract

We study concept learning for semantically-motivated, set-theoretic concepts. We first present an experiment in which we show that subjects learn concepts which cannot be represented by a simple Boolean logic. We then present a computational model which is similarly capable of learning these concepts,and show that it provides a good fit to human learning curves. Additionally, we compare the performance of several potential representation languages which are richer than Boolean logic in predicting human response distributions. Keywords: Rule-based concept learning; probabilistic model;semantics.