Analysis of “Interactive Learning of Structural Shape Descriptions from Automatically Generated Near-miss Examples”
Comments Made Elsewhere:
Summary:
Authors seek to create a system that automatically generates “near-misses” or alternatives to a LADDER description so that the shape designer can provide relative feedback. Want to handle the “conceptual errors” during LADDER description creation that result in an under- or over-constrained system.
Starts with an example shape drawn by the user, who then defines the constraints himself or has the system generate constraints for him (the system having heuristics to limit this down to a manageable list). the system then keeps running lists of good, bad, and possible constraints based positive and negative feedback.
First example shown are scale and rotation variants of the example shape. For over-constrained, goes through each constraint and shows the designer an example shape with that constraint’s negation to determine if it’s needed or not. For under-constrained, adds any additional constraints that fit and then tests if they should be there by example shapes made with their negation.
Author also discusses the steps for solving and generating a shape based on given constraints.
Discussion:
In this paper, the author presents work on way to get relative feedback from a shape designer to properly constrain a shape description in the LADDER language. I’m also familiar with relative feedback in the domain of information storage and retrieval, where a user marks documents or search results as good or bad. There, it is usually done in a vector space or using a weighted function. Here, it’s similar to a vector space comparison, you’re just going through each of the vector’s components one-by-one instead of marking an entire document and it’s representative vector as good or bad.
For a complex shape with lots of primitives, I wonder if the calculation of negative or possible constraints might have an adverse effect if the designer fails to notice the slight variation from one negated constraint. Does this system only work for simple shapes (i.e. arrows, squares, etc.)? Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the feature to work in my current version of LADDER.