Beyond Proportional Analogy

For some time now, I’ve been experimenting with algorithms for solving proportional analogies. A proportional analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning “A is to B as C is to D“. For example, quart:volume::mile:distance means “quart is to volume as mile is to distance”. Multiple-choice proportional analogy problems were part of the SAT college entrance test [...]

Structural Realism

Günther Greindl pointed out that my blog post on Attributes and Relations is similar to a philosophical position known as Structural Realism. I read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Structural Realism and, indeed, I would have to say that I am a structural realist. Thinking about structural realism, I saw that there is [...]

Hypotheses about Semantic Relations and Corpora

Some correspondence with Saif Mohammad inspired me to articulate some of the assumptions that underlie my corpus-based approach to analogies and semantic relations.

A Uniform Approach to Analogies, Synonyms, Antonyms, and Associations

In a previous post, I wondered how Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Relational Analysis (LRA) could be unified. LSA can be used to recognize synonyms and LRA can be used to recognize analogies. The two algorithms are quite similar, so it seems it should be possible to design a more general algorithm that [...]

Attributes and Relations: Redder than Red

An attribute is a characteristic of an entity, whereas a relation is a connection between two or more entities. In logic, we can define an attribute as a predicate with one argument and a relation as a predicate with two or more arguments. The distinction between attributes and relations can be unclear. For example, the [...]