Upward Refinement for Conceptual Blending in Description Logic: An ASP-based Approach and Case Study in EL

Conceptual blending is understood to be a process that serves a variety of cognitive purposes, including creativity, and has been highly influential in cognitive linguistics. In this line of thinking, human creativity is modeled as a blending process that takes different mental spaces as input and combines them into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this form of combinatorial creativity, a blend is constructed by taking the existing commonalities among the input mental spaces—known as the generic space—into account, and by projecting their structure in a selective way. Since input spaces for interesting blends are often initially incompatible, a generalisation step is needed before they can be blended. In this paper, we apply this idea to blend input spaces specified in the description logic EL++ and propose an upward refinement operator for generalising EL++ concepts. We show how the generalisation operator is translated to Answer Set Programming (ASP) in order to implement a search process that finds possible generalisations of input concepts. We exemplify our approach in the domain of computer icons.