Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Retrieving previous similar cases from a memory of cases is central to case-based reasoning systems. In most systems, this retrieval is done by a detailed indexing mechanism. Thagard and Holyoak argue that indexing is the wrong way to retrieve analogues. They propose a retrieval model (ARCS) based on a competing constraint satisfaction approach. In this paper, an explanation-based retrieval method (EBR) for retrieving analogues from a case-base with cases stored with respect to an interpretation of these cases as analyzed by a cognitive diagnostic component is described. The system is designed to the domain of problem solving in LISP. In a simulation study, it can be shown that the EBR-method performs equally well or even better than the ARCS-method.