king@rd1632.Dayton.NCR.COM (James King) (12/02/88)
SIMILARITY ... What does it mean?
for ANALOGY What are the measures?
for REMINDING Are there generalities or is it domain-specific?
for EXEMPLARS ... Etc. Etc.
I am performing independent research in the area of Case-Based
Reasoning, CBR, and I am working on various metrics for similarity.
In general, what ideas do you (the net-world) have about:
- What about a new situation reminds you of a prior experience?
- OR
- How does one situation remind you of another?
This is obviously a (too) wide open question and requires some clarity,
but I would rather not focus the discussion to a set of examples yet.
That is, unless it is more productive to do so. A little more focus
might be how does one discriminate and weight features of a new
situation (case) in relationship to a large case-base of experiences
that may or may not have a bearing on the new situation. Did that
provide more focus or fuzziness!?
I send this notice out as a preliminary "attention-getter" to
provide myself with some input to help form a more formal survey. Once
written I hope to send it to a specific set of researchers (consisting
mostly of people in the CBR, information retrieval (IR), doc. mngt. areas)
and to anyone in netland that requests so.
My goals are to:
- Produce some consensus of opinion on a view, or approach(es),
to similarity and the possibility of codifying it to aid in reminding
and retrieval of prior experiences.
- ALSO: I wish to propose to Dr. Katz at MITRE that a workshop be held
at IJCAI-89 which would address/discuss this area of concern. If
anyone is interested in adding support or input please let me
know. (We held a lively workshop on CBR at AAAI-88, and
I believe a focused workshop in a specific area that would
benefit CBR researchers as well as IR, AI, etc. is important.)
If anyone is interested in responding to any of this:
- I will watch the "nets" for replies
- Email to: j.a.king@dayton.ncr.com
- Call: (513)-445-1090 before 4:30 (EST) (317)-478-5910 after 6:00
- Mail: NCR Corp. 1700 S. Patterson WHQ-5E Dayton, OH 45479
After listening, talking to people, etc. for the next couple weeks I
will write up the survey (anyone can help form the survey) over Christmas
and send it out the first week in January. By February-March (15th?)
I will hopefully be able to publish preliminary results (to the net,
respondents, etc.).
I am fairly familiar with the discussions of similarity by Kolodner,
Schank, Rissland, Porter and others in the CBR field - also from the
IR field, Fox, Croft, Salton, etc. I have built one CBR system
and two applications where the similarity metric was determined from the
experts.
AND ... I am open to anyone's suggestions on reference works for
understanding similarity metrics, methodologies, etc.
Thank you for your time.
Jim King