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Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines
Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning
Teaching and Learning by Analogy: Psychological Perspectives on the Parables of Jesus
Christian teachers are often encouraged to use Jesus’ teaching strategies as models for their own pedagogy. Jesus frequently utilized analogical comparisons, or parables, to help his learners understand elements of his Gospel message. Although teachers can use analogical models to facilitate comprehension, such models also can sow the seeds of confusion and misconception. Recent advances in cognitive psychology have provided new theoretical frameworks to help us understand how instructional analogies function in the teaching-learning process. The goal of this paper is to analyze Jesus’ analogical teaching from these psychological perspectives, with implications for all teachers who utilize instructional analogies. In addition to reviewing basic analogical learning processes, I explore a six-variable model to account systematically for potential analogical misconceptions
Accelerating Innovation Through Analogy Mining
The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database)
could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people
with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful
analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent
challenge for either human or automated methods. Previous approaches include
costly hand-created databases that have high relational structure (e.g.,
predicate calculus representations) but are very sparse. Simpler
machine-learning/information-retrieval similarity metrics can scale to large,
natural-language datasets, but struggle to account for structural similarity,
which is central to analogy. In this paper we explore the viability and value
of learning simpler structural representations, specifically, "problem
schemas", which specify the purpose of a product and the mechanisms by which it
achieves that purpose. Our approach combines crowdsourcing and recurrent neural
networks to extract purpose and mechanism vector representations from product
descriptions. We demonstrate that these learned vectors allow us to find
analogies with higher precision and recall than traditional
information-retrieval methods. In an ideation experiment, analogies retrieved
by our models significantly increased people's likelihood of generating
creative ideas compared to analogies retrieved by traditional methods. Our
results suggest a promising approach to enabling computational analogy at scale
is to learn and leverage weaker structural representations.Comment: KDD 201
Automated Generation of Cross-Domain Analogies via Evolutionary Computation
Analogy plays an important role in creativity, and is extensively used in
science as well as art. In this paper we introduce a technique for the
automated generation of cross-domain analogies based on a novel evolutionary
algorithm (EA). Unlike existing work in computational analogy-making restricted
to creating analogies between two given cases, our approach, for a given case,
is capable of creating an analogy along with the novel analogous case itself.
Our algorithm is based on the concept of "memes", which are units of culture,
or knowledge, undergoing variation and selection under a fitness measure, and
represents evolving pieces of knowledge as semantic networks. Using a fitness
function based on Gentner's structure mapping theory of analogies, we
demonstrate the feasibility of spontaneously generating semantic networks that
are analogous to a given base network.Comment: Conference submission, International Conference on Computational
Creativity 2012 (8 pages, 6 figures
The Latent Relation Mapping Engine: Algorithm and Experiments
Many AI researchers and cognitive scientists have argued that analogy is the
core of cognition. The most influential work on computational modeling of
analogy-making is Structure Mapping Theory (SMT) and its implementation in the
Structure Mapping Engine (SME). A limitation of SME is the requirement for
complex hand-coded representations. We introduce the Latent Relation Mapping
Engine (LRME), which combines ideas from SME and Latent Relational Analysis
(LRA) in order to remove the requirement for hand-coded representations. LRME
builds analogical mappings between lists of words, using a large corpus of raw
text to automatically discover the semantic relations among the words. We
evaluate LRME on a set of twenty analogical mapping problems, ten based on
scientific analogies and ten based on common metaphors. LRME achieves
human-level performance on the twenty problems. We compare LRME with a variety
of alternative approaches and find that they are not able to reach the same
level of performance.Comment: related work available at http://purl.org/peter.turney
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