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Organizers

We are a group of motivated PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at Osnabrück University. Each one of us is conducting research on concepts from the perspective of their respective discipline, while being very interested in approaches taken in other fields. We strongly believe that we need an interdisciplinary approach if we want to comprehend what concepts are about.

You can contact us any time at concepts@uni-osnabrueck.de

Lucas Bechberger

Website In my Ph.D. project, I study concepts, using Gärdenfors’ framework of conceptual spaces, which describes concepts with geometric means. I formalize this framework in mathematical terms in order to make it suitable for knowledge representation in AI systems. Moreover, I use machine learning to automatically acquire geometric descriptions of concepts from mostly unlabeled data points.

Ulf Krumnack

Website I am a cognitive scientist with a background in mathematics. From this perspective, I investigate formal frameworks to model learning and reasoning tasks. My special interest applies to non-classical forms of reasoning, such as analogical inference and concept blending.

Mingya Liu

Website As a trained linguist, I investigate natural language semantics and pragmatics from formal, experimental, and cross-linguistic perspectives. I am particularly interested in the interaction of lexical and compositional meaning with conceptual information, background, and world knowledge, as well as related issues from a developmental perspective. One of the research areas I currently work on concerns the context-dependent interpretations of logical connectives in natural language and their reverse influence on the context and other co-occurring expressions.