Solving and explaining analogy questions using semantic networks

Abstract

Analogies are a fundamental human reasoning pattern that relies on relational similarity. Understanding how analogies are formed facilitates the transfer of knowledge between contexts. The approach presented in this work focuses on obtaining precise interpretations of analogies. We leverage noisy semantic networks to answer and explain a wide spectrum of analogy questions. The core of our contribution, the Semantic Similarity Engine, consists of methods for extracting and comparing graph-contexts that reveal the relational parallelism that analogies are based on, while mitigating uncertainty in the semantic network. We demonstrate these methods in two tasks: answering multiple choice analogy questions and generating human readable analogy explanations. We evaluate our approach on two data-sets totaling 600 analogy questions. Our results show reliable performance and low false-positive rate in question answering; human evaluators agreed with 96% of our analogy explanations.