Stephen F. Correl’s research while affiliated with University of Texas at Austin and other places

Natural kinds, such as the concepts toy block or photosynthesis, are ubiquitous in human reasoning yet lack definitional (i.e., individually necessary and jointly sufficient) properties as membership conditions. We want to represent a wide variety of assertions about these natural concepts with precision and logical consistency. Furthermore, we want to be able to verify that the meaning of each concept does not conflict with the constraints implied by its constituents. Classification-based approaches to these tasks have relied on definitional properties in order to deduce subsumption and thus detect inconsistency. These approaches are inapplicable for building representations of natural concepts. Our solution to these problems is twofold. First, we build KBs by iterative refinement; i.e., the KB is constructed through a sequence of editing operations. Second, we define practical, yet formal, properties of concept satisfiability and inheritance that each operator is guaranteed to prese...

One quality that makes biological systems appear intelligent is their robustness to difficult circumstances. Robustness is crucial to intelligent behavior and important to AI research. We distinguish between ante-failure and post-failure robustness for ...