Connectionists: Papers on computational creativity and semantic memory for avatars

[Wlodzislaw Duch]

Dear Connectionist,

your comments on the following papers will be appreciated: 

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Duch W (2006) Creativity and the Brain. 
A Handbook of Creativity for Teachers. Ed. Ai-Girl Tan (forthcoming)
http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/publications/kmk/06-Creativity-Brain.html

Neurocognitive approach to higher cognitive functions that bridges the gap
between psychological and neural level of description is introduced.
Relevant facts about the brain, working memory and representation of symbols
in the brain are summarized. Putative brain processes responsible for
problem solving, intuition, skill learning and automatization are described.
The role of non-dominant brain hemisphere in solving problems requiring
insight is conjectured. Two factors seem to be essential for creativity:
imagination constrained by experience, and filtering that selects most
interesting solutions. Experiments with paired words association are
analyzed in details and evidence for stochastic resonance effects is found.
Brain activity in the process of invention of novel words is proposed as the
simplest way to understand creativity using experimental and computational
means. Perspectives on computational models of creativity are discussed. 

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Duch W (2006) Computational Creativity. 
World Congres on Computational Intelligence, Vancouver, 16-21 July 2006 (in
print)
http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/publications/kmk/06-Creativity.html

Creative thinking is one of the hallmarks of human-level competence.
Although it is still a poorly understood subject speculative ideas about
brain processes involved in creative thinking may be implemented in
computational models. A review of different approaches to creativity,
insight and intuition is presented. Two factors are essential for
creativity: imagination and selection or filtering. Imagination should be
constrained by experience, while filtering in the case of creative use of
words may be based on semantic and phonological associations. Analysis of
brain processes involved in invention of new words leads to practical
algorithms that create many interesting and novel names associated with a
set of keywords. 

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Szymanski J, Sarnatowicz T, Duch W (2006) Towards Avatars with Artificial
Minds: Role of Semantic Memory. 
Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, American Scientific
Publishers (in print)
http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/publications/kmk/06-Avatars.html

The first step towards creating avatars with human-like artificial minds is
to give them human-like memory structures with an access to general
knowledge about the world. This type of knowledge is stored in semantic
memory. Although many approaches to modeling of semantic memories have been
proposed they are not very useful in real life applications because they
lack knowledge comparable to the common sense that humans have, and they
cannot be implemented in a computationally efficient way. The most drastic
simplification of semantic memory leading to the simplest knowledge
representation that is sufficient for many applications is based on the
Concept Description Vectors (CDVs) that store, for each concept, an
information whether a given property is applicable to this concept or not.
Unfortunately even such simple information about real objects or concepts is
not available. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description
vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries,
encyclopedias and unstructured text sources are described. Haptek-based
talking head that has an access to this memory has been created as an
example of a humanized interface (HIT) that can interact with web pages and
exchange information in a natural way. A few examples of applications of an
avatar with semantic memory are given, including the twenty questions game
and automatic creation of word puzzles. 

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Duch W, Szymanski J, Sarnatowicz T (2005) Concept description vectors and
the 20 question game. 
Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Advances in Soft
Computing, Springer Verlag (2005) 41-50 
http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/publications/kmk/05-CDV20Q.html

Knowledge of properties that are applicable to a given object is a necessary
prerequisite to formulate intelligent question. Concept description vectors
provide simplest representation of this knowledge, storing for each object
information about the values of its properties. Experiments with automatic
creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including
ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources, are
described. Information collected in this way is used to formulate questions
that have high discriminating power in the twenty questions game. 

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More papers may be found at:
http://www.is.umk.pl/~duch/cv/papall.html

Comparison of classification results and logical rules extracted from many
datasets:  
http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/kmk/projects/datasets.html

With best regards, 
Wlodzislaw Duch

______________________________________________________
Prof. Wlodzislaw Duch
Dept. of Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland; 
School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Google: Duch