We have developed a generic ontology of objects, and a knowledge base of everyday physical objects. Objects are represented as assemblies of functional features and their spatial relations. Generic shape information of objects and features is stored using a partial boundary representation. Formfunction reasoning is applied to deduce geometric shape elements from a feature’s functions. We have a...

Deep Learning” methods attempt to learn generic features in an unsupervised fashion from a large unlabelled data set. These generic features should perform as well as the best hand crafted features for any learning problem that makes use of this data. We provide a definition of generic features, characterize when it is possible to learn them and provide algorithms closely related to the deep be...

The present study aimed to investigate the generic organization of research article introductions in local Iranian and international journals in English for Specific Purposes, English for General Purposes, and Discourse Analysis. Overall, 120 published articles were selected from the established journals representing the above subdisciplines. Each subdiscipline was represented by 20 local and 2...

Artifacts pose a potential learning problem for children because the mapping between their features and their functions is often not transparent. In solving this problem, children are likely to rely on a number of information sources (e.g., others' actions, affordances). We argue that children's sensitivity to nuances in the language used to describe artifacts is an important, but so far unackn...