Baldwin D. & Goldstone R.L. (2007). Finding analogies within systems: Constraints on unsegmented matching. Proceedings of the Workshop on Analogies: Integrating Multiple Cognitive Abilities (AnICA07). Nashville, Tennessee.

The complex structure and organization of knowledge in the human mind is one of the key facets of thought. One of the fundamental cognitive processes that oper- ates over that structure is analogy. A typical compu- tational model of analogy might juxtapose a source do- main and a target domain, such as the solar system and the Bohr-Rutherford (BR) model of an atom (Gentner, 1983). The goal is to find a correspondence mapping between these two domains. Determining a mapping between the source and target domains of a non-trivial size would be intractable without a set of constraints to restrict the set of correspondences that are considered by a human reasoner. Moreover, the mere presence of domains serve as a constraint on mapping. In this paper, we study an alternative problem called unsegmented mapping – correspondence without specification of domains. We show a series of three formal constraints that allow for analogical-like mappings without explicit segmentation. The result, correspondence is possible without domains, has implications for models of analogical reasoning as well as schema induction and inference.

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