Analogy-- Watershed or Waterloo? Structural alignment and the development of connectionist models of analogy

Dedre Gentner, Arthur B. Markman

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5 (NIPS 1992)

Neural network models have been criticized for their inability to make use of compositional representations. In this paper, we describe a series of psychological phenomena that demonstrate the role of structured representations in cognition. These findings suggest that people compare relational representations via a process of structural alignment. This process will have to be captured by any model of cognition, symbolic or subsymbolic.