Abduction in semantic space: towards a logic of discovery.

Bruza, Peter; Song, Dawei; McArthur, Robert

Abstract

Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals are becoming ever more insular. This paper considers how awareness can be enhanced via abductive knowledge discovery the goal of which is to produce 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. Information flow computation between vectors is proposed as a means of suggesting potentially interesting implicit associations between concepts. Information flow is applied to computational scientific discovery by attempting to simulate Swanson's Raynaud-fish oil discovery in medical texts. Both automatic and semi-automatic attempts were studied and compared against suggestions computed via semantic association. Even though this work is preliminary and speculative in nature, there is some justification to believe that appropriate suggestions (hypotheses) can be "abduced" from semantic space.

Citation

BRUZA, P., SONG, D. and MCARTHUR, R. 2004. Abduction in semantic space: towards a logic of discovery. Logic journal of the IGPL [online], 12(2), pages 97-109. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/12.2.97

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2004
• Online Publication Date: Mar 31, 2004
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2004
• Deposit Date: Mar 13, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 13, 2009
• Journal: Logic journal of the IGPL
• Print ISSN: 1367-0751
• Electronic ISSN: 1368-9894
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 97-109
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/12.2.97
• Keywords: Abduction; Knowledge discovery; Scientific discovery
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/319
• Contract Date: Mar 13, 2009