From Conceptual Mash-ups to Bad-ass Blends: A Robust Computational Model of Conceptual Blending

Conceptual blending is a complex cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which we humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computational exploitation right now. In this chapter we introduce the notion of a conceptual mash-up, a robust form of blending that allows a computer to creatively reuse and extend its existing commonsense knowledge of a topic. We show also how a repository of such knowledge can be harvested automatically from the web, by targeting the casual questions that we pose to ourselves and to others every day. By acquiring its world knowledge from the questions of others, a computer can eventually learn to pose introspective questions of its own, in the service of its own creative mash-ups.