Analogies between sentences: Theoretical aspects -preliminary experiments

Stergos Afantenos (1, 2) , Tarek Kunz , Suryani Lin (3) , Henri Prade (4, 5) , Gilles Richard (4, 2)

1 IRIT-LILaC - Logique, Interaction, Langue et Calcul
2 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
3 Federation University [Churchill, Australia]
4 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
5 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Analogical proportions hold between 4 items a, b, c, d insofar as we can consider that "a is to b as c is to d". Such proportions are supposed to obey postulates, from which one can derive Boolean or numerical models that relate vector-based representations of items making a proportion. One basic postulate is the preservation of the proportion by permuting the central elements b and c. However this postulate becomes debatable in many cases when items are words or sentences. This paper proposes a weaker set of postulates based on internal reversal, from which new Boolean and numerical models are derived. The new system of postulates is used to extend a finite set of examples in a machine learning perspective. By embedding a whole sentence into a real-valued vector space, we tested the potential of these weaker postulates for classifying analogical sentences into valid and non-valid proportions. It is advocated that identifying analogical proportions between sentences may be of interest especially for checking discourse coherence, question-answering, argumentation and computational creativity. The proposed theoretical setting backed with promising preliminary experimental results also suggests the possibility of crossing a real-valued embedding with an ontology-based representation of words. This hybrid approach might provide some insights to automatically extract analogical proportions in natural language corpora.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Stergos Afantenos, Tarek Kunz, Suryani Lin, Henri Prade, Gilles Richard. Analogies between sentences: Theoretical aspects -preliminary experiments. 16th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2021), Sep 2021, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.3-18, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-86772-0_1⟩. ⟨hal-03859113⟩