A Structural Approach to Analogy

Abstract

There are multiple sorts of reasoning by analogy between two domains; the one with which we are concerned is a type of contextual analogy. The purpose of this paper is to see whether two domains that look analogous would be analogous in all aspects and contexts. To perform this, we analyse the domain according to different particularities. For each particularity or context we continue the analysis and search for another one within the same domain. In this way we create a kind of structure for the different domains. This sort of analysis is represented by frames and frames which are nested within each other. This paper describes this concept and an implemented system "MULTI_ANALOG", a limited example of knowledge-acquisition, problem solving, and automatic-acquisition based on this particular form of analogy namely structural analogy.