

Article 674 of comp.cog-eng:
Path: mimsy!dftsrv!ukma!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncrlnk!rd1632!king
>From: [email-masked] (James King)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Similarity Metrics: Reminding, Retrieval, CBR, etc.
Keywords: user interface computers complexity visualization control
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Dec 88 20:36:49 GMT
References: <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked] (James King)
Organization: R&D, NCR Corp., Dayton, Ohio
Lines: 64

SIMILARITY      ...  What does it mean?
for ANALOGY          What are the measures?
for REMINDING        Are there generalities or is it domain-specific?
for EXEMPLARS   ...  Etc. Etc.

I am performing independent research in the area of Case-Based
Reasoning, CBR, and I am working on various metrics for similarity.

In general, what ideas do you (the net-world) have about:
   - What about a new situation reminds you of a prior experience?
   - OR
   - How does one situation remind you of another?
This is obviously a (too) wide open question and requires some clarity, 
but I would rather not focus the discussion to a set of examples yet.
That is, unless it is more productive to do so.  A little more focus 
might be how does one discriminate and weight features of a new
situation (case) in relationship to a large case-base of experiences
that may or may not have a bearing on the new situation.  Did that
provide more focus or fuzziness!?

I send this notice out as a preliminary "attention-getter" to
provide myself with some input to help form a more formal survey.  Once 
written I hope to send it to a specific set of researchers (consisting
mostly of people in the CBR, information retrieval (IR), doc. mngt. areas)
and to anyone in netland that requests so.

My goals are to:
  - Produce some consensus of opinion on a view, or approach(es),
    to similarity and the possibility of codifying it to aid in reminding
    and retrieval of prior experiences.
  - ALSO:  I wish to propose to Dr. Katz at MITRE that a workshop be held
    at IJCAI-89 which would address/discuss this area of concern.  If
    anyone is interested in adding support or input please let me
    know.  (We held a lively workshop on CBR at AAAI-88, and 
    I believe a focused workshop in a specific area that would 
    benefit CBR researchers as well as IR, AI, etc. is important.)

If anyone is interested in responding to any of this:

   - I will watch the "nets" for replies
   - Email to:  [email-masked]
   - Call:  (513)-445-1090 before 4:30 (EST) (317)-478-5910 after 6:00
   - Mail:  NCR Corp.  1700 S. Patterson  WHQ-5E  Dayton, OH 45479

After listening, talking to people, etc. for the next couple weeks I
will write up the survey (anyone can help form the survey) over Christmas
and send it out the first week in January.  By February-March (15th?)
I will hopefully be able to publish preliminary results (to the net, 
respondents, etc.). 

I am fairly familiar with the discussions of similarity by Kolodner,
Schank, Rissland, Porter and others in the CBR field - also from the 
IR field, Fox, Croft, Salton, etc.  I have built one CBR system
and two applications where the similarity metric was determined from the
experts. 

BUT  ... I am open to anyone's suggestions on reference works for 
understanding similarity metrics, methodologies, etc.

Thank you for your time.

Jim King