Proceedings of CogSci89 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 Speci city Conjecture, which claims that naturalistic representations include a preponderance of appearance and low-order information. We demonstrate via computational experiments that this conjecture a ects how structural evaluation should be performed, including the choice of normalization technique and how the systematicity preference is implemented.