Dedre Gentner

NeurIPS Conference 1992 Conference Paper

Analogy-- Watershed or Waterloo? Structural alignment and the development of connectionist models of analogy

• Dedre Gentner
• Arthur Markman

Neural network models have been criticized for their inability to make use of compositional representations. In this paper, we describe a series of psychological phenomena that demonstrate the role of structured representations in cognition. These findings suggest that people compare relational representations via a process of structural alignment. This process will have to be captured by any model of cognition, symbolic or subsymbolic.

AIJ Journal 1990 Journal Article

A note on “creativity and learning in a case-based explainer”

• Dedre Gentner
• Kenneth Forbus

AIJ Journal 1989 Journal Article

The structure-mapping engine: Algorithm and examples

• Brian Falkenhainer
• Kenneth D. Forbus
• Dedre Gentner

This paper describes the structure-mapping engine (SME), a program for studying analogical processing. SME has been built to explore Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy, and provides a “tool kit” for constructing matching algorithms consistent with this theory. Its flexibility enhances cognitive simulation studies by simplifying experimentation. Furthermore, SME is very efficient, making it a useful component in machine learning systems as well. We review the structure-mapping theory and describe the design of the engine. We analyze the complexity of the algorithm, and demonstrate that most of the steps are polynomial, typically bounded by O(N2). Next we demonstrate some examples of its operation taken from our cognitive simulation studies and work in machine learning. Finally, we compare SME to other analogy programs and discuss several areas for future work.