Categories and Concepts

A book aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis. Facing a host of experiences in a complex world, an important human activity is to break up these activities into more manageable components - the process of categorization. Furthermore, the acquisition of concepts and categorical structures is a fundamental part of any learning process, and a significant part of any human communication consists of an exchange of categorical information. This book focuses on bringing together the cognitive research on categories and concepts and traditional classificatory data analysis - two major and intrinsically related scientific disciplines that study these topics. It provides an overview of today's most important cognitive-theoretical views on categories and concepts, and should be relevant to all interested in concepts in cognitive science, AI, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis. The classification of concepts and categories has been a key issue for cognitive psychologists and data analysists.
In this volume, the cognitive and data-analytic approaches are brought together for the first time. The book contains a state-of-the-art overview of current theoretical views on concepts and a tutorial introduction into data-analytic techniques to induce categories and category descriptions. It also reviews empirical evidence comparing these views and describes several applications.