A multi-strategy approach to structural analogy making

Analogy is the cognitive process of matching the characterizing features of two dierent items. This may enable reuse of knowledge across do- mains, which can be helpful to solve problems. Indeed, abstracting the `role' of the features away from their specic embodiment in the single items is fun- damental to recognize the possibility of an analogical mapping between them. In some sense, similarity is a (simpler) kind of analogy. In order to do so, a simple representation formalism could be the point of convergence for dier- ent reasoning operators needed to reproduce general cognitive mechanisms. Thus, using a formalism equivalent to graphs, this paper proposes the Roles Argumentation-based Mapper, a multi-strategy operator, that suggests plau- sible solutions obtained by exploring the entire search space. Applied to the most critical classical examples in the literature, it proved to be able to solve issues and to nd insightful analogies.