A theory of analogical mapping between source and target analogs based upon Interacting structural, semantic, and pragmatic constraints is proposed here. The structural constraint of isomorphism encourages mappings that maximize the consistency of relational corresondences between the elements of the two analogs. The constraint of semantic similarity supports mapping hypotheses to the degree that mapped predicates have similar meanings. The constraint of prog-mafic central/! / favors mappings involving elements the analogist believes to be Important in order to achieve the purpose for which the analogy Is being used. The theory is implemented in a computer program called ACME (Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine), which represents constraints by means of a network of supporting and competing hypotheses regarding what elements to map. A coop-erative algorithm for parallel constraint satisfaction identifies mapping hypotheses that collectively represent the overall mapping that best fits the interacting constraints. ACME has been applied to a wide range of examples that include problem analogies, analogical arguments, explanatory analogies, story analogies, formal analogies, and metaphors. ACME is sensitive to semantic and pragmatic Information if it Is available,.and yet able to compute mappings between formally Isomorphic analogs without any similar or identical elements. The theory Is able to account for empirical findings regarding the impact of consistency and similarity on human processing of analogies.

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There is widespread anecdotal evidence that expert programmers make use of visual mental images when they are designing programs. This evidence is used to justify the use of diagrams and visual programming languages during software design. This paper reports the results of two studies. In the first, expert programmers were directly questioned regarding the nature of their mental representations while they were engaged in a design task. This investigative technique was used with the explicit intention of eliciting introspective reports of mental imagery. In the second, users of a visual programming language responded to a questionnaire in which they were asked about cognitive processes. The resulting transcripts displayed a considerable number of common elements. These suggest that software design shares many characteristics of more concrete design disciplines. The reports from participants in the two studies, together with previous research into imagery use, indicate potential...

Modern computer systems routinely present information to the user as a combination of text and diagrammatic images, described as "graphical user interfaces". Practitioners and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) generally believe that the value of these diagrammatic representations is derived from metaphorical reasoning; they communicate abstract information by depicting a physical situation from which the abstractions can be inferred. This assumption has been prevalent in HCI research for over 20 years, but has seldom been tested experimentally. This thesis analyses the reasons why diagrams are believed to assist with abstract reasoning. It then presents the results of a series of experiments testing the contribution of metaphor to comprehension, problem solving, explanation and memory tasks carried out using a range of different diagrams. The results indicate that explicit metaphors provide surprisingly little benefit for cognitive tasks using diagrams as an external re...

This dissertation examines the role of salience in natural language generation (NLG). The salience of an entity, in intuitive terms, refers to its prominence, and is interpreted as a measure of how well an entity stands out from other entities and biases the preference of the generator in selecting words and complex constructs. Through an analysis of previous work in diverse disciplines, we show the variety of salience effects in NLG. Next, we classify several important determinants of salience, corresponding to different factors contributing to salience. We then delineate two theoretically-significant categories: canonical salience and instantial salience. The former is characterized as a built-in preference in the general conceptual- and linguistic knowledge of the speaker. The latter refers to the salience of specific objects in the context of NLG, and may accrue through such determinants as vividness and recency of mention. Psycholinguistic results of Osgood and Bock are highligh...

this article should be addressed to B. McElree, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003 (e-mail: bdm@psych. nyu.edu)

The aim of this paper is to reconsider the phenomena traditionally treated as cases of metonymy and to suggest a way of accounting for their production and comprehension. Metonymy is widely defined as a referential shorthand whose success is grounded on empirical associations among objects. I argue that this 'associationist' view (underlying the classical, the cognitive linguistics and the Gricean approach to metonymy) is in itself inadequate for a complete descriptive and explanatory account of metonymy. I propose instead that metonymy is a variety of interpretive use as defined within relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) and that its cognitive and communicative role can be very effectively treated by the general relevance-theoretic framework. I offer a number of applications of my approach which explain the on-line comprehension of metonymy, the variety of effects metonymic expressions can have, the relation between metonymy and metaphor, and the existence of a continuum of lexical metonymic uses with various degrees of convention- alisation.

this paper, I will discuss two di#erent metaphor theories, namely the comparison view on metaphors and the interactionist view, and I will show that interactionism is the best choice. In the third part, I will tackle some problems with the basic version of interactionism. I will explore some possible solutions and show that a logical approach of metaphors is an inherent part of a metaphor theory. In the fourth part, I will present an adaptive logic for metaphors. This logic di#ers from other logical approaches in the sense that it is very close to actual human reasoning and also in the sense that the logic itself # The research for this paper was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research --- Flanders. I want to thank Joke Meheus for her helpful comments while writing this paper

this paper is to reconsider the phenomena traditionally treated as cases of metonymy and to suggest a way of accounting for their production and comprehension

The work of Johannes Kepler offers clear examples of conceptual change. In this article, using Kepler's work as a case study, we argue that analogical reasoning