Using Color to Help in the Interactive Concept Formation

This article describe s a technique that aims at qualifying a concept hierarchy with colors, in such a way that it can be feasible to promote the interactivity between the user and an incremental probabilistic concept formation algorithm. The main idea behind this technique is to use colors to map the concept properties being generated, to combine them, and to provide a resulting color that will represent a specific concept. The intention is to assign similar colors to similar concepts, thereby making it possible for the user to interact with the algorithm and to intervene in the concept formation process by identifying which approximate concepts are being separately formed. An operator for interactive merge has been used to allow the user to combine concepts he/she considers sim ilar. Preliminary evaluation on concepts generated after interaction has demonstrated improved accuracy.