Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals and groups are becoming ever more insular. This paper considers how awareness can be enhanced via abductive knowledge discovery the goal of which is to produce suggestions which can span disparate islands of knowledge. Knowledge representation is motivated from a cognitive perspective. Words and concepts are represented as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space automatically derived from a text corpus. Information flow computation between vectors (...) is proposed as a means of suggesting potentially interesting implicit associations between concepts. Information flow is applied to computational scientific discovery by attempting to simulate Swanson's Raynaud-fish oil discovery in medical texts. Both automatic and semi-automatic attempts were studied and compared against suggestions computed via semantic association. Even though this work is preliminary and speculative in nature, there is some justification to believe that appropriate suggestions can be “abduced” from semantic space. (shrink)

Diminishing awareness is a consequence of the information explosion: disciplines are becoming increasingly specialized; individuals and groups are becoming ever more insular. This article considers how awareness can be enhanced via operational abductive systems. The goal is to generate and justify suggestions which can span disparate islands of knowledge. Knowledge representation is motivated from a cognitive perspective. Words and concepts are represented as vectors in a high dimensional semantic space automatically derived from a text corpus. Various mechanisms will be presented (...) for computing suggestions from semantic space: information flow, semantic similarity, pre-inductive generalization. The overall goal of this article is to introduce semantic space to the model-based reasoning and abduction community and to illustrate its potential for principled, operational abduction by semi-automatically replicating the Swanson Raynaud/fish oil discovery in medical text. (shrink)