The Paradoxical Role of Similarity in Creative Reasoning

In this paper we present a semantic similarity metric that wholly relies on the hierarchical structure of WordNet which makes it amenable as a means of evaluating creativity when considering creative recategorizations of concepts in an Ontology (Veale, 2004). Many creative discoveries are only acknowledged long after their conception due to changes in the evaluation criteria (Bento and Cardoso, 2004), therefore evaluation plays a critical role in creative reasoning systems. We evaluate the similarity function and report a correlation value of 0.84 between human and machine similarity judgments on the dataset of (Miller and Charles, 1991), which is suggestively close to the upper-bound of 0.88 postulated by (Resnik, 1999). We then use the similarity metric as basis for evaluating some examples of creative categorizations. An extension of the metric is also suggested as a means of assessing analogical similarity by looking for analogical cues