Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Structure-Mapping Engine (SME) has successfully modeled several aspects of human analogical processing. However, it has two significant drawbacks: (l) SME constructs all structurally consistent interpretations of an analogy. While useful for theoretical explorations, this aspect of the algorithm is both psychologically implausible and computationally inefficient. (2) SME contains no mechanism for focusing on interpretations relevant to an analogizer's goals. This paper describes modifications to SME which overcome these flaws. W e describe a greedy merge algorithm which efficiently computes an approximate "best" interpretation, and can generate alternate interpretations when necessary. W e describe pragmatic marking, a technique which focuses the mapping to produce relevant, yet novel, inferences. W e illustrate these techniques via example and evaluate their performance using empirical data and theoretical analysis.