Components of a Learning System

We first propose a terminology for the components of an empirical learning system. 

A teacher trainer, instructor) chooses instance descriptions (examples) of instances of the intended concept, and presents them to a learner. There are different ways of presenting examples all-at-once and chunk-wise (for instance, one-by-one). 

Sometimes, the learner asks or queries an oracle (informant) for classification of examples it invents itself. The oracle is usually the teacher, but it is sometimes automated via reliance on other information, such as background knowledge. 

This terminology is sufficient for our purposes. But note that a complete and general learning system would have many more components, such as a blackboard, an example selector, and so on. An ideal architecture is described by [van Lamsweerde 91]. 

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