Discovering Conceptual Differences among People from Cases

Abstract

We propose a method for discovering conceptual differences (CD) among people from cases. In general different people seem to have different ways of conception and thus can have different concepts even on the same thing

Removing CD when people with different backgrounds and knowledge carry out collaborative works as a group; otherwise they cannot communicate ideas and establish mutual understanding even on the same thing. In our approach knowledge of users is structured into decision trees so that differences in concepts can be discovered as the differences in the structure of trees. Based on the candidates suggested by the system with our discovering algorithms, the users then discuss each other on differences in their concepts and modify them to reduce the differences. CD is gradually removed by repeating the interaction between the system and users. Experiments were carried out on the cases for motor diagnosis with artificially encoded CD. Admittedly our approach is simple, however, the result shows that our approach is effective to some extent as the first step toward dealing with the issue of CD among people