© The Author, 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Original Articles |
Towards Operational Abduction from a Cognitive Perspective
1 School of Information Systems. Queensland University of Technology. Brisbane (Australia). E-mail: p.bruza{at}qut.edu.au, 2 School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. University of Queensland. Brisbane (Australia). E-mail: rcole{at}itee.uq.edu.au, 3 Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes (United Kingdom). E-mail: d.song{at}open.ac.uk, 4 School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. University of Queensland. Brisbane (Australia). E-mail: zeen{at}itee.uq.edu.au
Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals and groups are becoming ever more insular. This article considers how awareness can be enhanced via operational abductive systems. The goal is to generate and justify suggestions which can span disparate islands of knowledge. Knowledge representation is motivated from a cognitive perspective. Words and concepts are represented as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space automatically derived from a text corpus. Various mechanisms will be presented for computing suggestions from semantic space: information flow, semantic similarity, pre-inductive generalization. The overall goal of this article is to introduce semantic space to the model-based reasoning and abduction community and to illustrate its potential for principled, operational abduction by semi-automatically replicating the Swanson Raynaud/fish oil discovery in medical text.
Key Words: abduction, knowledge discovery, scientific discovery
Received July 31, 2005.