Similarity in Cognition: A Review of Similarity and Analogical Reasoning

Analogical although analogy can help, as note that although still in its infancy reasoning is thus achieved in such well as hamper, learning. The role of and somewhat simplistic in character, systems by mainly keeping the analogy in learning is discussed by connectionist research might prove abstract relational microfeatures. Ann Brown and by Rand Spiro et al., to have an edge in tackling these Rumelhart proposes another way and the role of analogy in knowledge problems. The research described in for achieving analogical reasoning, acquisition is discussed by Brian Ross this book presents a grand challenge that is, "soft clamp," in which input and by John Bransford et al.; Stella and a future prospect for AI clamps can be overridden, and the Vosniadou studies the developmental researchers (traditional or connectionistic) rule of thumb is that the more concrete change in the use of analogy. Because in their endeavor to find a a feature is, the easier it can be part 3 of the book is of marginal better and more cognitively plausible overridden. The system finds the interest to AI, I do not discuss it any representation scheme.

This paper describes the structure-mapping engine (SME), a program for studying analogical processing. SME has been built to explore Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy, and provides a “tool kit” for constructing matching algorithms consistent with this theory. Its flexibility enhances cognitive simulation studies by simplifying experimentation. Furthermore, SME is very efficient, making it a useful component in machine learning systems as well. We review the structure-mapping theory and describe the design of the engine. We analyze the complexity of the algorithm, and demonstrate that most of the steps are polynomial, typically bounded by O(N2).

In IJCAI-87, Proc. Tenth Intl. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Milan, Italy: Morgan Kaufmann, 1987, Vol. 1, pp. 264-270.

Stuart J. Russell Department of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 ABSTRACT In the absence of specific relevance information, the traditional assumption in the study of analogy has been that the most similar analogue is most likely to provide the correct solutions; a justification for this assumption has been lacking, as has any relation between the similarity measure used and the probability of correctness of the analogy. We show how a statistical analysis can be performed to give the probability that a given source will provide a successful analogy, using only the assumption that there are some relevant features somewhere in the source and target descriptions. The predicted variation of the probability with source-target similarity corresponds closely to empirical analogy data obtained by Shepard for human and animal subjects for a wide variety of domains. The utility of analogy by similarity seems to rest on some very fundamental assumptions about the nature of our representations.* I INTRODUCTION Analogical reasoning is usually defined as the argument from known similarities between two things to the existence of further similarities.