Beyond Classification: Automatic Learning in Archaeology and Cultural Studies

Any dictionary definition suggests that learning involves the acquisition of knowledge or behaviour. Chris Thornton, in a thought provoking essay suggests that learning tasks must be presented in the form of example association pairs (Thornton 2000). Consequently, he defines all learning tasks in terms of mapping. A learner agent can always read this mapping in two ways: as saying what actions should be produced in a given situation or as predicting which actions should be produced in a given situation. The idea of prediction comes from the fact that a task will be considered to have been successfully learned if we are able to produce correct associations for test items in the majority of cases.