Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Structural Evaluation of Analogies: What Counts?

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.