Measuring the Feasibility of Analogical Transfer using Complexity

Abstract: Analogies are 4-ary relations of the form "A is to B as C is to D". While focus has been mostly on how to solve an analogy, i.e. how to find correct values of D given A, B and C, less attention has been drawn on whether solving such an analogy was actually feasible. In this paper, we propose a quantification of the transferability of a source case (A and B) to solve a target problem C. This quantification is based on a complexity minimization principle which has been demonstrated to be efficient for solving analogies. We illustrate these notions on morphological analogies and show its connections with machine learning, and in particular with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation.