This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractWhat makes a category seem natural or intuitive? In this paper, an unsupervised categorization task was employed to examine observer agreement concerning the categorization of nine different stimulus sets. The stimulus sets were designed to capture different intuitions about classification structure. The main empirical index of category intuitiveness was the frequency of the preferred classification, for different stimulus sets.With 169 participants, and a within participants design, with some stimulus sets the most frequent classification was produced over 50 times and with others not more than two or three times. The main empirical finding was that cluster tightness was more important in determining category intuitiveness, than cluster separation. The results were considered in relation to the following models of unsupervised categorization: DIVA, the rational model, the simplicity model, SUSTAIN, an unsupervised version of the generalized context model (UGCM), and a simple geometric model based on similarity. DIVA, the geometric approach, SUSTAIN, and the UGCM provided good, though not perfect, fits. Overall, the present work highlights several theoretical and practical issues regarding unsupervised categorization and reveals weaknesses in some of the corresponding formal models.

This paper studies questions of coherence and strictification related to selfsimilarity-the identity S ∼ = S ⊗ S in a semi-monoidal category. Based on Saavedra's theory of units, we first demonstrate that strict self-similarity cannot simultaneously occur with strict associativity-i.e. no monoid may have a strictly associative (semi-) monoidal tensor, although many monoids have a semi-monoidal tensor associative up to isomorphism. We then give a simple coherence result for the arrows exhibiting self-similarity and use this to describe a 'strictification procedure' that gives a semimonoidal equivalence of categories relating strict and non-strict self-similarity, and hence monoid analogues of many categorical properties. Using this, we characterise a class of diagrams (built from the canonical isomorphisms for the relevant tensors, together with the isomorphisms exhibiting the self-similarity) that are guaranteed to commute, and give a simple intuitive interpretation of this characterisation.

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The role of types in categorical models of meaning is investigated. A general scheme for how typed models of meaning may be used to compare sentences, regardless of their grammatical structure is described, and a toy example is used as an illustration. Taking as a starting point the question of whether the evaluation of such a type system 'loses information', we consider the parametrized typing associated with connectives from this viewpoint.The answer to this question implies that, within full categorical models of meaning, the objects associated with types must exhibit a simple but subtle categorical property known as self-similarity. We investigate the category theory behind this, with explicit reference to typed systems, and their monoidal closed structure. We then demonstrate close connections between such self-similar structures and dagger Frobenius algebras. In particular, we demonstrate that the categorical structures implied by the polymorphically typed connectives give rise to a (lax unitless) form of the special forms of Frobenius algebras known as classical structures, used heavily in abstract categorical approaches to quantum mechanics.

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