Nonsense and Sensibility: Inferring Unseen Possibilities
Charles Kemp, Lauren Azevedo Schmidt, Joshua B. Tenenbaum · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006
How do we distinguish the sensible yet unlikely (blue bananas) from the nonsensical (hour-long bananas), given observations only of what is true in the world (e.g., yellow bananas)?Judgments like these may be supported by the M constraint: the assumption that ontological categories are organized into a predicability tree, and that properties apply to different subtrees within this hierarchy.We provide a computational theory that shows how the M constraint can be used to acquire predicability trees given observations only of what is true.We also suggest how the M constraint itself could be learned.