This is work in progress for my bachelor thesis. It is based on the CS implementation described below.

Version 1.0.0: Release

Version 1.1.0: Release

Version 1.2.0: Release

Version 1.3.0: Release

This repository contains a thorough implementation of the conceptual spaces framework.

Relevant publications about this implementation and its underlying mathematical formalization include:

• Lucas Bechberger and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger. "A Thorough Formalization of Conceptual Spaces". 40th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017. Paper Preprint
• Lucas Bechberger and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger. "Measuring Relations Between Concepts In Conceptual Spaces". 37th SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017. Paper Preprint
• Lucas Bechberger and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger. "A Comprehensive Implementation of Conceptual Spaces". 5th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, 2017. Paper Preprint
• Lucas Bechberger and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger. "Formal Ways for Measuring Relations between Concepts in Conceptual Spaces". Expert Systems, 2018. Paper Preprint
• Lucas Bechberger and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger. "Formalized Conceptual Spaces with a Geometric Representation of Correlations". In: Mauri Kaipainen, Antti Hautamäki, Peter Gärdenfors, and Frank Zenker: “Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications”. Synthese Library. Paper Preprint

If you find this implementation or its underlying formalization useful and plan to use it in your own work, please cite one of the above papers. Thank you!

Our implementation uses Python 2.7 up to version 1.2 and Python 3.6 in version 1.3. The migration to Python 3 has been kindly provided by Marius Pol. Currently, our code has the following dependencies: numpy, scipy, matplotlib, Shapely, statsmodels, numdifftools. You should be able to install them by executing pip install -r requirements.txt. Alternatively, you can use the script install_environment.sh to create a conda environment called CSpy3 using miniconda which should contain all necessary dependencies for running the code. If you have trouble getting scipy to work, please refer to the official scipy website for further assistance. Same holds for matplotlib.

In general, the individual code files should be run from their respective directory in order to make sure that all imports work as expected. The folder conceptual_spaces/demo/ contains two example spaces which will be used in our overview below. You can do an interactive demo by moving into this directory, calling python and then writing from fruit_space import *. The ConceptInspector will be displayed and you can execute all of the operations discussed below, updating the ConceptInspector with ci.update() if necessary (more details below).

We provide a short overview of our framework in the following sections.

A conceptual space can be defined as follows:

import cs.cs as space
domains = {"color":[0], "shape":[1], "taste":[2]}
space.init(3, domains)

The first line imports the module responsible for representing the overall conceptual space.

The second line provides the domain structure of the space. In this case, we have three domains: color, shape, and taste. Each of them consists of a single dimension. The domain structure is thus a dictionary mapping from domain names to list of dimension indices. Note that each dimension of the space must belong to exactly one domain.

The third line initializes the space with the desired number of dimensions and the specified domain structure. Note that the number of dimension given here and the number of dimensions in the domain structure must match.

We can now define a concept as follows:

c_pear = Cuboid([0.5, 0.4, 0.35], [0.7, 0.6, 0.45], domains)
s_pear = Core([c_pear], domains)
w_dim = {"color":{0:1}, "shape":{1:1}, "taste":{2:1}}
w_pear = Weights({"color":0.50, "shape":1.25, "taste":1.25}, w_dim)
pear = Concept(s_pear, 1.0, 24.0, w_pear)

The first line defines a cuboid with the support points p_min = [0.5, 0.4, 0.35] and p_max = [0.7, 0.6, 0.45]. Note that this cuboid is defined on the whole space, as there are values for all three dimensions. This is also the reason why we pass the overall domain structure as a second argument - the cuboid is defined on all domains.

The second line builds a core out of this single cuboid. In theory, we can give a list of multiple cuboids as a first parameter to this constructor. The only constraint is that these cuboids need to have a nonempty intersection. We also need again to specify the set of domains on which this core is defined (which in this case is again the whole space).

The third line defines a set of weights for the dimensions. As the sum of dimension weights within each dimension must equal 1.0, and as each domain only contains a single dimension, all the dimension weights are set to 1.0 here.

The fourth line defines the domain weights and the overall weights parameter. As one can see, the 'shape' and the 'taste' domain are weighted higher than the 'color' domain in this case. Note that the sum of the domain weights must equal the number of domains. If the provided numbers don't add up, the constructor of the Weights class will normalize them automatically.

Finally, the fifth line creates the 'pear' concept. We use the core defined in line 2 and the weights defined in line 4. The maximal membership is set to 1.0 and the sensitivity parameter (which controls the rate of the membership function's exponential decay) is set to 24.

For convenience, the conceptual space also contains a dictionary for storing concepts. We can add our newly created concept to this dictionary under the identifier 'pear' as follows:

space.add_concept("pear", pear)

In the file conceptual_spaces/demo/fruit_space.py, we have already defined several concepts for different types of fruit along with some properties. Variables for fruit concepts (with identifiers in parentheses): pear ('pear'), orange ('orange'), lemon ('lemon'), granny_smith ('Granny Smith'), apple ('apple'), banana ('banana'). Variables for properties: red ('red'), green, ('green'), blue ('blue'), non_sweet ('nonSweet'). There is also a demo() function in this file that displays the information of this readme file.

The folder conceptual_spaces/demo/images/ contains some 2D and 3D visualizations of these concepts.

We can display a concept by simply printing it:

print(pear)
    core: {[0.5, 0.4, 0.35]-[0.7, 0.6, 0.45]}
    mu: 1.0
    c: 24.0
    weights: <{'color': 0.5, 'taste': 1.25, 'shape': 1.25},{'color': {0: 1.0}, 'taste': {2: 1.0}, 'shape': {1: 1.0}}>

We can execute the following operations on a concept c:

• c.membership_of(x): computes the membership of a point x to the concept c.
• c.intersect_with(d): computes the intersection of the concepts c and d.
• c.union_with(d): computes the unification of the two concepts c and d.
• c.project_onto(domains): projects the concept c onto the given domains.
• c.cut_at(dimension, value): cuts the concept c into two parts. The cut is placed at the given value on the given dimension.
• c.size(): computes the size of the concept c.
• c.subset_of(d): computes the degree to which the concept c is a subset of the concept d.
• c.implies(d): computes the degree to which the concept c implies the concept d.
• c.similarity_to(d): computes the degree of similarity between the concept c and the concept d.
• c.between(d, e): decides whether the concept c is between the concepts d and e.

Let us illustrate these operations with some examples:

pear.membership_of([0.6, 0.5, 0.4])
    1.0
pear.membership_of([0.3, 0.2, 0.1])
    1.243706023602872e-07
print(pear.intersect_with(apple))
    core: {[0.5, 0.625, 0.35]-[0.7, 0.625, 0.45]}
    mu: 0.4723665527
    c: 20.0
    weights: <{'color': 0.5, 'taste': 1.125, 'shape': 1.375},{'color': {0: 1.0}, 'taste': {2: 1.0}, 'shape': {1: 1.0}}>
print(pear.union_with(apple))
    core: {[0.5, 0.4, 0.35]-[0.7125, 0.6687500000000001, 0.45625000000000004], [0.5, 0.65, 0.35]-[0.8, 0.8, 0.5], [0.65, 0.65, 0.4]-[0.85, 0.8, 0.55], [0.7, 0.65, 0.45]-[1.0, 0.8, 0.6]}
    mu: 1.0
    c: 20.0
    weights: <{'color': 0.5, 'taste': 1.125, 'shape': 1.375},{'color': {0: 1.0}, 'taste': {2: 1.0}, 'shape': {1: 1.0}}>
print(pear.project_onto({'color':[0]}))
    core: {[0.5, -inf, -inf]-[0.7, inf, inf]}
    mu: 1.0
    c: 24.0
    weights: <{'color': 1.0},{'color': {0: 1.0}}>
first, second = pear.cut_at(1, 0.5)
print(first)
    core: {[0.5, 0.4, 0.35]-[0.7, 0.5, 0.45]}
    mu: 1.0
    c: 24.0
    weights: <{'color': 0.5, 'taste': 1.25, 'shape': 1.25},{'color': {0: 1.0}, 'taste': {2: 1.0}, 'shape': {1: 1.0}}>
print(second)
    core: {[0.5, 0.5, 0.35]-[0.7, 0.6, 0.45]}
    mu: 1.0
    c: 24.0
    weights: <{'color': 0.5, 'taste': 1.25, 'shape': 1.25},{'color': {0: 1.0}, 'taste': {2: 1.0}, 'shape': {1: 1.0}}>
apple.size()
    0.0455
lemon.size()
    0.005000000000000002
granny_smith.subset_of(apple)
    1.0
apple.subset_of(granny_smith)
    0.07635041551246535
granny_smith.crisp_subset_of(apple)
    True
apple.crisp_subset_of(granny_smith)
    False
apple.implies(red)
    0.2727272727272726
lemon.implies(non_sweet)
    1.0
apple.similarity_to(pear)
    0.0398322124027715
pear.similarity_to(apple)
    0.0398322124027715
granny_smith.similarity_to(apple)
    0.1537267080745342
apple.similarity_to(pear, method='subset')
    0.05043467196991022
pear.similarity_to(apple, method='subset')
    0.118091638175
granny_smith.similarity_to(apple, method='subset')
    1.0
apple.between(lemon, orange)
    0.87552874038096906
banana.between(granny_smith, pear)
    0.43811732667337056
granny_smith.between(lemon, orange)
    0.8789129336237107
apple.between(lemon, orange, method='minimum')
    0.0
banana.between(granny_smith, pear, method='minimum')
    0.0
granny_smith.between(lemon, orange, method='minimum')
    0.82471568013506558

Our implementation provides also a visualization tool: The so-called ConceptInspector (see conceptual_spaces/visualization/concept_inspector.py). You can execute it with the following code:

import visualization.concept_inspector as ci 
ci.init()

The first line imports the necessary package. The second line calls the initialization method of the ConceptInspector.The ConceptInspector grabs all information about domains, dimensions, and concepts from the cs module. You should therefore only call ci.init() once you have initialized your conceptual space and created all concepts.

The ConceptInspector provides one 3D and three 2D visualizations of the conceptual space. You can interactively change the dimensions used for these visualizations as well as the set of concepts being displayed. If you have added, modified, or removed concepts after your call to ci.init(), you can tell the ConceptInspector to update its internal list of concepts:

ci.update()

Only when this function is called, the ConceptInspector will update its internal list of concepts based on the concepts stored in the cs module.

The names that are displayed for the different dimensions are taken from the cs.cs module. When initializing this module, one can provide an array of dimension names:

space.init(doms, 3, ["hue", "round", "sweet"])

If no such array of dimension names is provided, the ConceptInspector will generate names based on the indices: dim_0, dim_1, ... Finally, one can also provide for each concept the color with which it should be visualized. This happens when adding a concept to the dictionary:

space.add_concept('apple', apple, 'r')

The ConceptInspector will in this example make sure that the apple concept is visualized in red and labeled as apple. If no color is given, the ConceptInspector will loop through a list of predefined colors when drawing the different concepts.