Visual analogy: Viewing analogical retrieval and mapping as constraint satisfaction problems

摘要

The core issue of analogical reasoning is the transfer of relational knowledge from a source case to a target problem. Visual analogical reasoning pertains to problems containing only visual knowledge. Holyoak and Thagard proposed that the retrieval and mapping tasks of analogy in general can be productively viewed as constraint satisfaction problems, and provided connectionist implementations of their proposal. In this paper, we reexamine the retrieval and mapping tasks of analogy in the context of diagrammatic cases, representing the spatial structure of source and target diagrams as semantic networks in which the nodes represent spatial elements and the links represent spatial relations. We use a method of constraint satisfaction with backtracking for the retrieval and mapping tasks, with subgraph isomorphism over a particular domain language as the similarity measure. Results in the domain of 2D line drawings suggest that at least for this domain the above method is quite promising.