Structural Evaluation of Analogies : What Counts?

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 Gentner's structure-mapping theory . We focus on structural evaluation, explicating several principles which psychologically plausible algorithms should follow . We introduce the Specificity Conjecture, which claims that naturalistic representations include a preponderance of appearance and low-order information . We 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.