A Connectionist Account of Analogy-Making
Schedule
Thursday, November 5, 2020
16:00 UTC
Ivan Vankov
Dr
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Host: Analogical Minds
Recording
Open recording
Event Information
Recording
Available
Host
Analogical Minds
Duration
60 minutes
Abstract
Analogy-making is considered to be one of the cognitive processes which are hard to be accounted for in connectionist terms. A number of models have been proposed, but they are either tailed for specific analogical tasks or require complicated mechanisms which don’t fit into the mainstream connectionist modelling paradigm. In this talk I will present a new connectionist account of analogy-making based on the vector approach to representing symbols (VARS). This approach allows representing relational structures of varying complexity by numeric vectors with fixed dimensionality. I will also present a simple and computationally efficient mechanism of aligning VARS representations, which integrates both semantic similarity and structural constraints. The results of a series of simulations will demonstrate that VARS can account for basic analogical phenomena.
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