Similarity is a central cognitive mechanism for humans which enables a broad range of perceptual and abstraction processes, including recognizing and categorizing objects, drawing parallelism, and predicting outcomes. It has been studied computationally through models designed to replicate human judgment. The work presented in this dissertation leverages general purpose semantic networks to derive similarity measures in a problem-independent manner. We model both general and relational similarity using connectivity between concepts within semantic networks. Our first contribution is to model general similarity using concept connectivity, which we use to partition vocabularies into topics without the need of document corpora. We apply this model to derive topics from unstructured dialog, specifically enabling an early literacy primer application to support parents in having better conversations with their young children, as they are using the primer together. Second, we model relational similarity in proportional analogies. To do so, we derive relational parallelism by searching in semantic networks for similar path pairs that connect either side of this analogy statement. We then derive human readable explanations from the resulting similar path pair. We show that our model can answer broad-vocabulary analogy questions designed for human test takers with high confidence. The third contribution is to enable symbolic plan repair in robot planning through object substitution. When a failure occurs due to unforeseen changes in the environment, such as missing objects, we enable the planning domain to be extended with a number of alternative objects such that the plan can be repaired and execution to continue. To evaluate this type of similarity, we use both general and relational similarity. We demonstrate that the task context is essential in establishing which objects are interchangeable.

Creator

• Boteanu, Adrian

Contributors

• Dougherty, Daniel J.
• Chernova, Sonia
• Littman, Michael
• Sidner, Candace

Degree

• PhD

Unit

• Computer Science

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Language

• English

Identifier

• etd-082615-130317

Keyword

• Robot Tasks
• Plan Repair
• Topic Modeling
• Semantic
• Analogy
• Similarity

Advisor

• Chernova, Sonia

Committee

• Sidner, Candace
• Dougherty, Daniel J.
• Littman, Michael

Defense date

• 2015-08-17

Year

• 2015

Date created

• 2015-08-26

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright

Last modified

• 2023-09-19