Extending Ontological Categorization Through a Dual Process Conceptual Architecture

In this work we present a hybrid knowledge representation system aiming at extending the representational and reasoning capabili- ties of classical ontologies by taking into account the theories of typical- ity in conceptual processing. The system adopts a categorization process inspired to the dual process theories and, from a representational perspec- tive, is equipped with a heterogeneous knowledge base that couples con- ceptual spaces and ontological formalisms. The system has been exper- imentally assessed in a conceptual categorization task where common sense linguistic descriptions were given in input, and the corresponding target concepts had to be identified. The results show that the proposed solution substantially improves the representational and reasoning “con- ceptual” capabilities of standard ontology-based systems.