Optimality Principles in Computational Approaches to Conceptual Blending: Do We Need Them (at) All?

Optimality principles are a key element in the Conceptual Blending (CB) framework, as they are responsible for guiding the integration process towards ‘good blends’. Despite their relevance, these principles are often overlooked in the design of computational models of CB. In this paper, we analyse the explicit or implicit presence and relevance of the optimality principles in three different computational approaches to the CB, known from the literature. The approaches chosen for the analysis are Divago, Blending from a generalisationbased analogy model, and blending as a convolution of neural patterns. The analysis contains a discussion on the relevance of the principles and how some of absent principles can be introduced in the different models.