Conceptual Blending in EL++

The cognitive theory of conceptual blending models human creativity as a mental process that combines two mental spaces into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this theory, a blend is constructed by taking the commonalities among the input mental spaces into account, to form a so-called generic space, and by projecting their non-common structure in a selective way to the novel blended space. In this paper, we apply this idea to blend input spaces modeled as complex EL concepts. To construct the generic space of two EL concepts, these need to be generalised in a controlled manner. For this, we propose an upward refinement operator that is used for finding common generalisations of EL concepts.