This paper reports insights gained from observing groups of novice designers apply biological analogies to solve design problems. We recorded the discourse of fourth-year mechanical engineering students during biomimetic design sessions. We observed that the availability of associations from superficial or functional characteristics of biological knowledge led to fixation, which affected the de...

We present our approach to defining similarity between software artifacts and discuss its potential exploitation in software reuse by analogy. We first establish properties of similarity which support its role in retrieving and mapping software descriptions. Then we develop a systematic basis for comparison within a fairly general conceptual modelling framework, whereby comparable elements of t...

Non-canonical constructions differ from canonical structures in that they carry extra pragmatic meaning relating their arguments to the current discourse. One important question is how language users learn the pragmatic relationships that govern these variations. This paper proposes that these relationships can be learned through analogical generalization over first explicit and then inferentia...

A model of cued recall is proposed. Its basic assumption is that processes of structural mapping and analogical transfer lie at the core of human cognition. Recall is viewed as a result of construction of a new episode, analogical to the old episode. The response items emerge from dynamic creation and competition of various hypotheses about what has happened. Thus, some psychological data about...

In this paper we develop a fuzzy model for the description of the process of Analogical Reasoning by representing its main steps as fuzzy subsets of a set of linguistic labels characterizing the individuals’ performance in each step and we use the ShannonWiener diversity index as a measure of the individuals’ abilities in analogical problem solving. This model is compared with a stochastic mode...

Analogical reminding in humans and machines is a great source for chance discoveries because analogical reminding can produce representational change and thereby produce insights. Here, we present a new kind of representational change associated with analogical reminding called packing. We derived the algorithm in part from human data we have on packing. Here, we explain packing and its role in...

The creativity of natural language poses a significant theoretical problem. One example of this is denominal verbs (those derived from nouns) such as spoon in “She spooned me some sugar”. Traditional generative approaches typically posit a unique entry in the lexicon for this usage, though this approach has difficulty scaling. Construction Grammar has evolved as a competing theory which instead...

Using Analogy to Overcome Brittleness in AI Systems Matthew Evans Klenk One of the most important aspects of human reasoning is our ability to robustly adapt to new situations, tasks, and domains. Current AI systems exhibit brittleness when faced with new situations and domains. This work explores how structure mapping models of analogical processing allow for the robust reuse of domain knowled...

This paper reports a practical application of a computational model of analogical reasoning to a pressing social problem, which is to improve the care of older people with dementia. Underpinning the support for carers for people with dementia is a computational model of analogical reasoning that retrieves information about cases from analogical problem domains. The model implements structure-ma...

AHEAD (Analogical Hypothesis Elaborator for Activity Detection) is a research software system under development for hypothesis elaboration. Although AHEAD embodies a domain-independent approach, we are currently applying it to the task of elaborating detected hostile activities. In this application, AHEAD is given as input (1) structured evidence and (2) a hypothesis concerning the activities o...