Concept Formation Rules: An Executable Cognitive Model of Knowledge Construction

We develop a cognitive model of knowledge construction inspired by constructivist theory as well as by recent natural language processing methodologies. Our generalization of these methodologies into a new and directly executable cognitive paradigm, concept formation, has been tested in nontrivial applications with very promising results. Our system accommodates user definition of properties between concepts as well as user commands to relax their enforcement. It also accepts concept formation from concepts that violate principles that have been declared as relaxable, and produces a list of satisfied properties and a list of violated properties as a side effect of the normal application of the rule.