admin%cogsci.Berkeley.EDU@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (03/11/87)
SESAME Colloquium 10/16 Jeff Shrager Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Monday 16 March 1987 2515 Tolman Hall 4:00 pm Abstract Analogy and conceptual combination deal with more than one knowledge structure. Only structures which are based on the same terms and relations can generally be combined by these mechanisms. In order to make conceptual combination work smoothly with large representationally heterogeneous knowledge bases, I am working toward automated high-level to high-level representational alignment. My approach is based upon the intuitive model of how two speakers would communicate if they had incompatible understandings of some domain. The process involves "grounding" terms and relations in the high-level representations into common lower-level representations and then constructing constraints based upon the structure of this grounding trace. This talk will focus on the cognitive motivations for grounding and ground-directed alignment and on the cognitive implications of the requirements imposed on mental models by ground-directed alignment. Grounding highlights the difference in the content terms of mental models: grounded terms versus ungrounded terms, which have a counterpart in the difference between empirical and derived terms in qualitative mental models. I show how the grounding of such models into animations gives us a concrete handle on the relationship between imagery and the symbolic processes.