Analogy-based learning and Natural Language Processing

The role and power of analogy in the acquisition and mastering of language has been largely neglected in recent linguistic literature. An explanation can mainly be found in the inherent difficulty of defining a formal setting for a rigorous evaluation of the power of analogy, which has thus been dismissed by most formal linguists as a woolly and at best unworkable notion. Nowadays, the general availability of computers with huge and cheap storage resources appears to offer an unprecedented opportunity for an algorithmic definition of analogy and for a scientific assessment of its role in Natural Language Processing applications. We discuss recent work in this area in collaboration with the "Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale" (ILC-CNR), Pisa.