Analogical Proportions and Creativity: A Preliminary Study
Abstract
Analogical proportions are statements of the form “a is to b as c is to d”, which express that the compar- ison of the elements in pair (a,b) and in pair (c,d) yield similar results. Analogical proportions are cre- ative in the sense that given 3 distinct items, the rep- resentation of a 4th item d, distinct from the previous items, which forms an analogical proportion with them, can be calculated, provided certain conditions are met. After providing an introduction to analogical propor- tions and their properties, the paper reports the results of an experiment made with a database of animal de- scriptions and their class, where we try to “create ” new animals from existing ones, retrieving rare animals such as platypus. We perform a series of experiments us- ing word embeddings as well as Boolean features in or- der to propose novel animals based on analogical pro- portions, comparing the symbolic approach with non- contextual embeddings showing that such word embed- dings obtain also good results. Furthermore we provide a series of experiments with sentence embeddings us- ing contextual embeddings which are less conclusive. Finally, we also propose a more sophisticated creative process based on analogical proportions where the set of pairs (a, b) used is chosen and enlarged by means of a property-preserving operation.
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