Implicit Analogy-Making: A Connectionist Exploration Douglas S. Blank Indiana University Computer Science Department Lindley Hall 215 Bloomington, IN 47405 blank@cs.indiana.edu Table of Contents Introduction Representation, Architecture & Training Procedure Experiments Discussion References Introduction Most everyone, including the experts, would agree that analogy-making is best defined as a process that creates a mapping between items in one domain (often called the source) to "similar" items in another (often called the target). Based on this definition, many researchers have attempted to model analogy-making by creating a mapping between two sets of data structures that represent the domains (see (Gentner, 1983 ) and (Holyoak and Thagard, 1989 ), for example.) In fact, most researchers treat an analogy as if it were equivalent to a mapping between the two domains. Let us refer to this type of modeling as "explicit analogy-making" as it represents the analogy via a set of explicit correspondences. An explicit analogy-making model might begin with the representations of the dynamics of heat-flow and water-flow, including relevant relations and attributes (see Figure 1 ) (Gentner, 1983 ). A set of correspondences, representing a mapping between all analogous items in the two domains, would then be produced by the model. 1 of 8 7/23/97 8:08 PM MAICS96: Blank http://www.cs.indiana.edu/event/maics96/Proceedings/Blank/blank.html