Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Any system with explanatory capabilities must be able to generate descriptions of concepts defined in its knowledge base. The use of analogies to highlight selected features in these descriptions can greatly enhance their effectiveness, as analogies are a powerful and compact means of communicating ideas and descriptions. In this paper, w e describe a system that can make use of analogies in generating descriptions. W e outline the differences between using analogies in problem solving and using them in language generation, and show h o w the discourse structure kept by our generation system provides knowledge that aids finding an acceptable analogy to express.