---
title: "The Competence of Sub-Optimal Theories of STructure Mapping on Hard Analogies"
authors:
  - "Tony Veale"
  - "Mark T. Keane"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/35"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0035.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "232-236"
track: "Case-based Reasoning"
keywords:
---

# The Competence of Sub-Optimal Theories of STructure Mapping on Hard Analogies

Tony Veale, Mark T. Keane

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 232-236.

## Abstract

Structure-mapping is a provably NP-Hard problem which is argued to lie at the core of the human metaphoric and analogical reasoning faculties. This NP-Hardness has meant that early attempts at optimal solutions to the problem have had to be augmented with sub-optimal heuristics to ensure tractable performance. This paper considers various grounds for qualifying the competence of such heuristic approaches, and offers an evaluation of the sub-optimal performance of three different models of analogy, SME, ACME and Sapper.