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Structural Evaluation of Analogies: What Counts?
© 1989 by the author(s). Learn more.
Abstract
Judgments of similarity and soundness are important aspects of human analogical processing. This paper explores how these judgments can be modeled using SME, a simulation of Centner's structure-mapping theory. W e focus on structural evaluation, explicating several principles which psychologically plausible algorithms should follow. W e introduce the Specificity Conjecture, which claims that naturalistic representations include a preponderance of appearance and low-order information. W e demonstrate via computational experiments that this conjecture affects how structural evaluation should be performed, including the choice of normalization technique and how the systematicity preference is implemented.