Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogical resasoning is an important part of human intelligence. We often employ it as a vehivle for conveying ideas, and we rely upon it whenever we make a decision about a new situation [STER77]. This paper presents a theory of analogy recognition and comprehension, using as a domain letters to the editors of weekly news magazines. Our theory relies on lexical clues and the comparison of conceptual similarities to trigger recognition of the analogies in these letters. Our conceptual representation of an analogy in memory utilises comparison links to map analogous elements to each other and to tie together parallel arguments. We demonstrate application of this theory to a prototypical letter. The current status of a program implementing this theory is reviewed, and future research directions are discussed.