Category: What is …?

What is a “β Variational Autoencoder”?

I’ve already talked about InfoGAN [1] a couple of times (here, here, and here). InfoGAN is a specific neural network architecture that claims to extract interpretable and semantically meaningful dimensions from unlabeled data sets – exactly what we need in order to automatically extract a conceptual space from data.

InfoGAN is however not the only architecture that makes this claim. Today, I will talk about the β-variational autoencoder (β-VAE) [2] which uses a different approach for reaching the same goal.

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What is “Multidimensional Scaling”?

I’ve already talked about how to potentially obtain the dimensions of a conceptual space with artificial neural networks in a previous blog post. That approach is based on machine learning techniques, but there’s also a more traditional way of extracting a conceptual space: Conducting a psychological experiment and using a type of algorithm called “multidimensional scaling”. Today, I would like to give a quick overview of this approach.

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What is “Constructive Alignment” and why do we need it?

Over the past few weeks, I have been pretty busy fulfilling my teaching duties. As I haven’t done much researching, I won’t talk about research today, but about “Constructive Alignment”, which is an approach for planning lectures, seminars and other courses.

The constructive alignment process consists of three steps:

  1. Defining the learning targets
  2. Planning the examination
  3. Planning the course

But wait a second, why does planning the course appear as the last step in this process?

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What are “Logic Tensor Networks”?

About half a year ago, I mentioned “Logic Tensor Networks” in my short summary of the Dagstuhl seminar on neural-symbolic computation. I think that this is a highly interesting approach, and as I intend to work with it in the future, I will shortly introduce this framework today.

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What are “language games”?

In one of my previous posts, I’ve shown a little overview diagram of my PhD research. One component of this diagram was called “language games” and so far I have not explained what that means. Well, today I’m going to give a short introduction into this topic.

Language games [1] focus on the question of “how can language come into existence?”, i.e., “What are possible mechanisms that allow different individuals to come up with a shared vocabulary that they can use to communicate about things in the world?”. I admit that this sounds a bit abstract, so let me illustrate the problem with an example:

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