A New Measurement of Systematic Similarity

The relationship of similarity may be the most universal relationship that exists between every two objects in either the material world or the mental world. Although similarity modeling has been the focus of cognitive science for decades, many theoretical and realistic issues are still under controversy. In this paper, a new theoretical framework that conforms to the nature of similarity and incorporates the current similarity models into a universal model is presented. The new model, i.e., the systematic similarity model, which is inspired by the contrast model of similarity and structure mapping theory in cognitive psychology, is the universal similarity measurement that has many potential applications in text, image, or video retrieval. The text relevance ranking experiments undertaken in this research tentatively show the validity of the new model.