A descriptive approach for automatic generation of visual blends is presented. The implemented system, the Blender, is composed of two components: the Mapper and the Visual Blender. The approach uses structured visual representations along with sets of visual relations which describe how the elements (in which the visual representation can be decomposed) relate among each other. Our system is a hybrid blender, as the blending process starts at the Mapper (conceptual level) and ends at the Visual Blender (visual representation level). The experimental results show that the Blender is able to create analogies from input mental spaces and produce well-composed blends, which follow the rules imposed by its base-analogy and its relations. The resulting blends are visually interesting and some can be considered as unexpected.
2AbstractStructure-mapping or structural alignment is fast emerging as a unifying principle fora variety of different phenomena; including analogy, metaphor, similarity andconceptual combination. In this paper, we argue that it is inappropriate to extendthis idea to conceptual combination, as has been done in dual-process theory(Wisniewski, 1997a, in press). There are theoretical and empirical grounds fortaking up this position. We propose an alternative account based on the constrainttheory of combination (see Costello, 1996; Costello & Keane, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, inpress), which views the interpretation of concept combinations as one of satisfyingmultiple constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility and informativeness. This theory,which we would like to advertise as being the truth, does not use structure-mapping.We conclude by promoting the idea that rather than applying analogy’s constraints toconceptual combination, it may be more productive to consider how conceptualcombination’s constraints might apply to analogy. The main subject of this paper is to describe an experiment of blending two domains using our previous work, Blender [1], a computational attempt to model Fauconnier and Turner’s [2] Conceptual Blending. In this experiment, we visualize the resulting instances using a logo-like language, allowing us to produce visual blends. We discuss the results and suggest further improvements. This paper introduces a new approach to user interface design and other areas, called algebraic semiotics. The approach is based on a notion of sign, which allows complex hierarchical structure and incorporates the insight (emphasized by Saussure) that signs come in systems, and should be studied at that level, rather than individually. A user interface can be considered as a representation of the underlying functionality to which it provides access, and thus user interface design can be considered a craft of constructing such representations, where both the interface and the underlying functionality are considered as (structured) sign systems. In this setting, representations appear as mappings, or morphisms, between sign systems, which should preserve as much structure as possible. This motivates developing a calculus having systematic ways to combine signs, sign systems, and representations. One important mode of composition is blending, introduced by Fauconnier and Turner; we relate this to certain concepts from the very abstract area of mathematics called category theory. Applications for algebraic semiotics include not only user interface design, but also cognitive linguistics, especially metaphor theory and cognitive poetics. The main contribution of this paper is the precision it can bring to such areas. Building on an insight from computer science, that discrete structures can be described by algebraic theories, sign systems are defined to be algebraic theories with extra structure, and semiotic morphisms are defined to be mappings of algebraic theories that (to some extent) preserve the extra structure. As an aid for practical design, we show that the quality of representations is closely related to the preservation properties of semiotic morphisms; these measures of quality also provide the orderings needed by our category theoretic formulation of blending.