Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a model of the use of expert knowledge to improve accuracy of aneJog retrieval. This model, match refinement by structural difference links ( M R S D L ) , is based upon the assumption that expertise in domains requiring analogicad reasoning consists in part of knowledge of the structural similarities and differences between some pairs of the source analogs. In an empirical evaluation on four data sets, M R S D L consistently retrieved the most similar or nearly most similar source analog. Achieving comparable accuracy on these data sets with a two-stage retrieval technique such as M A C / F A C would require exhaustive matching with more than half of the source anedogs. The evaluation also showed that parallel competitive matching is often substantially faster than exhaustive matching or M R S D L .