DEFINING STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTIONS

A formalism for representing descriptions based upon labelled directed graphs is presented. Node and edge labels are assumed to lie in lattice‐like structures which capture certain semantic relationships between object classes and predicates, respectively. With this as a framework, the problem of inferring descriptions of a concept from examples is defined. In particular, the problem of constructing a more general description can be viewed as a process of iverting transformations used to generate instances of a description. Several examples are given and some problems are cited.