Related papers: Where do ideas come from?
Most creative outputs are readily classified as belonging to a particular domain such as art, music, or technology. But does that mean the creative thinking that goes into creative projects respects these conventional domain boundaries?…
Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to…
We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model…
This thesis investigates the generation of new concepts from combinations of existing concepts as a language evolves. We give a method for combining concepts, and will be investigating the utility of composite concepts in language evolution…
Creative processes are widely believed to involve the generation of multiple, discrete, well-defined possibilities followed by exploration and selection. An alternative, inspired by parallel distributed processing models of associative…
Divergent thinking in the ideation stage of creative problem-solving demands that individuals explore a broad design space. Yet this exploration rarely follows a neat, linear sequence; problem-solvers constantly shift among searching,…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Through a mixed-method analysis of data from Scratch, we examine how novices learn to program with simple data structures by using community-produced learning resources. First, we present a qualitative study that describes how…
In an era of increasing societal fragmentation, political polarization, and erosion of public trust in institutions, representative deliberative assemblies are emerging as a promising democratic forum for developing effective policy…
The arise of disagreement is an emergent phenomenon that can be observed within a growing social group and, beyond a certain threshold, can lead to group fragmentation. To better understand how disagreement emerges, we introduce an…
The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, general cognitive competences are a product of a prolonged and complex process of…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
Online, visual artists have more places than ever to routinely share their creative work and connect with other artists. These interactions support the routine enactment of creative identity in artists and provide inspirational…
In open-domain conversational systems, it is important but challenging to leverage background knowledge. We can use the incorporation of knowledge to make the generation of dialogue controllable, and can generate more diverse sentences that…
Writers generally rely on plans or sketches to write long stories, but most current language models generate word by word from left to right. We explore coarse-to-fine models for creating narrative texts of several hundred words, and…
While generative models have become powerful tools for image synthesis, they are typically optimized for executing carefully crafted textual prompts, offering limited support for the open-ended visual exploration that often precedes idea…
Writing about a subject enriches writers' understanding of that subject. This cognitive benefit of writing -- known as constructive learning -- is essential to how students learn in various disciplines. However, does this benefit persist…
Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are intended to convey information that is based on evidence provided in a given source text. We discuss the challenges of training a generative neural dialogue model for such systems that is controlled…