Case Based Reasoning Research and

Development 22nd International

Conference ICCBR 2014 Cork Ireland
September 29 2014 October 1 2014
Proceedings 1st Edition Luc
Lamontagne
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/case-based-reasoning-research-and-development-22
nd-international-conference-iccbr-2014-cork-ireland-september-29-2014-october-1-20
14-proceedings-1st-edition-luc-lamontagne/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web 5th

International Conference KESW 2014 Kazan Russia
September 29 October 1 2014 Proceedings 1st Edition
Pavel Klinov
https://textbookfull.com/product/knowledge-engineering-and-the-
semantic-web-5th-international-conference-kesw-2014-kazan-russia-
september-29-october-1-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-pavel-klinov/

Conceptual Modeling 33rd International Conference ER

2014 Atlanta GA USA October 27 29 2014 Proceedings 1st
Edition Eric Yu

https://textbookfull.com/product/conceptual-modeling-33rd-
international-conference-er-2014-atlanta-ga-usa-
october-27-29-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-eric-yu/

Case Based Reasoning Research and Development 28th

International Conference ICCBR 2020 Salamanca Spain
June 8 12 2020 Proceedings Ian Watson

https://textbookfull.com/product/case-based-reasoning-research-
and-development-28th-international-conference-
iccbr-2020-salamanca-spain-june-8-12-2020-proceedings-ian-watson/

System Analysis and Modeling Models and Reusability 8th

International Conference SAM 2014 Valencia Spain
September 29 30 2014 Proceedings 1st Edition Daniel
Amyot
https://textbookfull.com/product/system-analysis-and-modeling-
models-and-reusability-8th-international-conference-
sam-2014-valencia-spain-september-29-30-2014-proceedings-1st-
Case Based Reasoning Research and Development 26th
International Conference ICCBR 2018 Stockholm Sweden
July 9 12 2018 Proceedings Michael T. Cox

https://textbookfull.com/product/case-based-reasoning-research-
and-development-26th-international-conference-
iccbr-2018-stockholm-sweden-july-9-12-2018-proceedings-michael-t-
cox/

Serious Games Development and Applications 5th

International Conference SGDA 2014 Berlin Germany
October 9 10 2014 Proceedings 1st Edition Minhua Ma

https://textbookfull.com/product/serious-games-development-and-
applications-5th-international-conference-sgda-2014-berlin-
germany-october-9-10-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-minhua-ma/

Experimental Algorithms 13th International Symposium

SEA 2014 Copenhagen Denmark June 29 July 1 2014
Proceedings 1st Edition Joachim Gudmundsson

https://textbookfull.com/product/experimental-algorithms-13th-
international-symposium-sea-2014-copenhagen-denmark-
june-29-july-1-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-joachim-gudmundsson/

Discovery Science 17th International Conference DS 2014

Bled Slovenia October 8 10 2014 Proceedings 1st Edition
Sašo Džeroski

https://textbookfull.com/product/discovery-science-17th-
international-conference-ds-2014-bled-slovenia-
october-8-10-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-saso-dzeroski/

Search Based Software Engineering 6th International

Symposium SSBSE 2014 Fortaleza Brazil August 26 29 2014
Proceedings 1st Edition Claire Le Goues

https://textbookfull.com/product/search-based-software-
engineering-6th-international-symposium-ssbse-2014-fortaleza-
brazil-august-26-29-2014-proceedings-1st-edition-claire-le-goues/
 Luc Lamontagne
Enric Plaza (Eds.)

Case-Based Reasoning
LNAI 8765

Research
and Development
22nd International Conference, ICCBR 2014
Cork, Ireland, September 29 – October 1, 2014
Proceedings

123
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 8765

Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science

LNAI Series Editors

Randy Goebel
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Yuzuru Tanaka
Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Wolfgang Wahlster
DFKI and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

LNAI Founding Series Editor

Joerg Siekmann
DFKI and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
Luc Lamontagne Enric Plaza (Eds.)

Case-Based Reasoning
Research
and Development
22nd International Conference, ICCBR 2014
Cork, Ireland, September 29 - October 1, 2014
Proceedings

13
Volume Editors
Luc Lamontagne
Université Laval
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Québec, Canada
E-mail: luc.lamontagne@ift.ulaval.ca
Enric Plaza
IIIA, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute CSIC
Spanish National Research Council
Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain
E-mail: enric@iiia.csic.es

ISSN 0302-9743 e-ISSN 1611-3349

ISBN 978-3-319-11208-4 e-ISBN 978-3-319-11209-1
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-11209-1
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948036

LNCS Sublibrary: SL 7 – Artificial Intelligence

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection
with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication
or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s location,
in ist current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use
may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution
under the respective Copyright Law.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication,
neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or
omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein.
Typesetting: Camera-ready by author, data conversion by Scientific Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Printed on acid-free paper
Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
 Preface

This volume comprises the papers presented at ICCBR 2014: the 22nd Inter-
national Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (http://www.iccbr.org/iccbr14/)
which took place from September 29 through October 1, 2014 at the Imperial
Hotel in Cork, Ireland. There were 49 submissions from 17 countries spanning
North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Each one was reviewed
by three Program Committee members using the criteria of relevance, signifi-
cance, originality, technical quality, and presentation. The committee accepted
19 papers for oral presentation and 16 papers for poster presentation at the
conference.
The International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) is the pre-
eminent international meeting on case-based reasoning (CBR). Previous IC-
CBR conferences have been held in Sesimbra, Portugal (1995), Providence, USA
(1997), Seeon Monastery, Germany (1999), Vancouver, Canada (2001), Trond-
heim, Norway (2003), Chicago, USA (2005), Belfast, UK (2007), Seattle, USA
(2009), Alessandria, Italy (2010), London, UK (2011), Lyon, France (2012) and
most recently in Saratoga Springs, USA.
Day 1 of ICCBR featured topical workshops on current and interesting as-
pects of CBR including case-based agents, reasoning with social media content,
reasoning about time in CBR and synergies between CBR and Data Mining. The
Doctoral Consortium involved presentations by ten graduate students in collab-
oration with their respective senior CBR research mentors. Day 1 also hosted
the Computer Cooking Contest, the aim of which is to promote the use of AI
technologies such as case-based reasoning, information extraction, information
retrieval, and semantic technologies.
Days 2 and 3 consisted of scientific paper presentations on theoretical and
applied CBR research as well as invited talks from two distinguished scholars:
Tony Veale, lecturer at the School of Computer Science at University College
Dublin, Ireland, and Frode Sørmo, Chief Technology Officer at Verdande Tech-
nology, Trondheim, Norway. Tony Veale gave a keynote address on creative reuse
of past solutions and how cut-up techniques can be applied to compositional
reuse. Frode Sørmo presented case studies explaining how Verdande Technology
applies case-based reasoning techniques to oil drilling operations, financial ser-
vices and healthcare monitoring. This volume includes contributions describing
the main ideas presented in these keynote presentations.
The presentations and posters covered a wide range of CBR topics of interest
both to researchers and practitioners including case retrieval and adaptation,
case base maintenance, case-based planning, textual CBR, and applications to
Web technologies, traffic management, product recommendation, facial recogni-
tion, home automation, and fault diagnosis.
VI Preface

Many people participated in making ICCBR 2014 a success. Derek Bridge,

University College Cork, Ireland, served as the conference chair with Luc Lamon-
tagne, Laval University, Canada and Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain, as program
co-chairs. We would like to thank David Leake, Indiana University, USA, and
Jean Lieber, LORIA, France, who acted as workshop chairs. Our thanks also
go to Rosina Weber, Drexel University, USA, and Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert
Gordon University, UK, for organizing the Doctoral Consortium. We thank Mir-
jam Minor, Goethe University, Germany and Emmanuel Nauer, LORIA, France,
who were responsible for the Computer Cooking Competition. We are also very
grateful to all our sponsors, which at the time of printing included the Artificial
Intelligence Journal, the Department of Computer Science at University Col-
lege Cork, Empolis, Fáilte Ireland, Knexus Research Corporation and Verdande
Technology. We also want to acknowledge the support of AAAI and the Cork
Convention Bureau.
We thank the Program Committee and the additional reviewers for their
timely and thorough participation in the reviewing process. We appreciate the
time and effort put in by the local organizers. Finally, we acknowledge the sup-
port of EasyChair in the submission, review, and proceedings creation processes,
and we thank Springer for its continued support in publishing the proceedings
of ICCBR.

July 2014 Luc Lamontagne

Enric Plaza
 Organization

Program Committee
Agnar Aamodt NTNU, Norway
David Aha Naval Research Laboratory, USA
Klaus-Dieter Althoff DFKI/University of Hildesheim, Germany
Ralph Bergmann University of Trier, Germany
Isabelle Bichindaritz State University of New York at Oswego, USA
Alan Black Drexel University, USA
Derek Bridge University College Cork, Ireland
William Cheetham CDPHP, USA
Alexandra Coman Northern Ohio University, USA
Amélie Cordier LIRIS-CNRS, France
Susan Craw The Robert Gordon University, UK
Sarah Jane Delany Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Belen Diaz-Agudo Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Michael Floyd Carleton University, Canada
Ashok Goel Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Mehmet Goker Salesforce, USA
Pedro González Calero Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Luc Lamontagne Laval University, Canada
David Leake Indiana University, USA
Jean Lieber LORIA - Inria Lorraine, France
Ramon López de Mántaras IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Cindy Marling Ohio University, USA
Lorraine McGinty University College Dublin, Ireland
David McSherry University of Ulster, UK
Alain Mille LIRIS-CNRS, France
Mirjam Minor Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt, Germany
Stefania Montani University Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Hector Munoz-Avila Lehigh University, USA
Santiago Ontañón Drexel University, USA
Miltos Petridis Brighton University, UK
Enric Plaza IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Luigi Portinale University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Ashwin Ram PARC, USA
Juan Recio-Garcia Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Thomas Roth-Berghofer University of West London, UK
Jonathan Rubin PARC, USA
VIII Organization

Barry Smyth University College Dublin, Ireland

Antonio Sánchez-Ruiz Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Ian Watson University of Auckland, New Zealand
Rosina Weber Drexel University, USA
David Wilson University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Nirmalie Wiratunga The Robert Gordon University, UK

Additional Reviewers
Black, Alan McGreggor, Keith
Canensi, Luca Mueller, Gilbert
Cox, Michael Quijano Sanchez, Lara
Cunningham, Padraig Reuss, Pascal
Dufour-Lussier, Valmi Sahay, Saurav
Fitzgerald, Tesca Sani, Sadiq
Goerg, Sebastian Sauer, Christian Severin
Leonardi,Giorgio Schulte-Zurhausen, Eric
Kendall-Morwick, Joseph Schumacher, Pol
Massie, Stewart Vattam, Swaroop
 Table of Contents

Invited Talks
What I Talk about When I Talk about CBR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Frode Sørmo

Running with Scissors: Cut-Ups, Boundary Friction and Creative

Reuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Tony Veale

Research Papers
Learning Solution Similarity in Preference-Based CBR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Amira Abdel-Aziz, Marc Strickert, and Eyke Hüllermeier

Case-Based Parameter Selection for Plans: Coordinating Autonomous

Vehicle Teams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Bryan Auslander, Tom Apker, and David W. Aha

Automatic Case Capturing for Problematic Drilling Situations . . . . . . . . . 48

Kerstin Bach, Odd Erik Gundersen, Christian Knappskog, and
Pinar Öztürk

Algorithm for Adapting Cases Represented in a Tractable Description

Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Liang Chang, Uli Sattler, and Tianlong Gu

Sentiment and Preference Guided Social Recommendation . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Yoke Yie Chen, Xavier Ferrer, Nirmalie Wiratunga, and Enric Plaza

A Hybrid CBR-ANN Approach to the Appraisal of Internet Domain

Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Sebastian Dieterle and Ralph Bergmann

Further Experiments in Opinionated Product Recommendation . . . . . . . . 110

Ruihai Dong, Michael P. O’Mahony, and Barry Smyth

How Much Do You Trust Me? Learning a Case-Based Model of Inverse

Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Michael W. Floyd, Michael Drinkwater, and David W. Aha

Tuuurbine: A Generic CBR Engine over RDFS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

Emmanuelle Gaillard, Laura Infante-Blanco, Jean Lieber, and
Emmanuel Nauer
X Table of Contents

How Case-Based Reasoning on e-Community Knowledge Can Be

Improved Thanks to Knowledge Reliability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Emmanuelle Gaillard, Jean Lieber, Emmanuel Nauer, and
Amélie Cordier

Case-Based Object Placement Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

Kellen Gillespie, Kalyan Moy Gupta, and Michael Drinkwater

On the Role of Analogy in Resolving Cognitive Dissonance in

Collaborative Interdisciplinary Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Ashok K. Goel and Bryan Wiltgen

On Retention of Adaptation Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

Vahid Jalali and David Leake

Case-Based Reasoning for Improving Traffic Flow in Urban

Intersections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Anders Kofod-Petersen, Ole Johan Andersen, and Agnar Aamodt

Estimating Case Base Complexity Using Fractal Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . 230

K.V.S. Dileep and Sutanu Chakraborti

CBR Tagging of Emotions from Facial Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

Paloma Lopez-de-Arenosa, Belén Dı́az-Agudo, and
Juan A. Recio-Garcı́a

A Proposal of Temporal Case-Base Maintenance Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . 260

Eduardo Lupiani, Jose M. Juarez, and Jose Palma

Using Case-Based Reasoning to Detect Risk Scenarios of Elderly People

Living Alone at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Eduardo Lupiani, Jose M. Juarez, Jose Palma,
Christian Serverin Sauer, and Thomas Roth-Berghofer

An Algorithm for Conversational Case-Based Reasoning in Classification

Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
David McSherry

Towards Process-Oriented Cloud Management with Case-Based

Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Mirjam Minor and Eric Schulte-Zurhausen

Workflow Streams: A Means for Compositional Adaptation in

Process-Oriented CBR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Gilbert Müller and Ralph Bergmann

Collective Classification of Posts to Internet Forums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330

Pádraig Ó Duinn and Derek Bridge
 Table of Contents XI

NudgeAlong: A Case Based Approach to Changing User Behaviour . . . . . 345

Eoghan O’Shea, Sarah Jane Delany, Rob Lane, and
Brian Mac Namee
Explaining Probabilistic Fault Diagnosis and Classification Using
Case-Based Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
Tomas Olsson, Daniel Gillblad, Peter Funk, and Ning Xiong
Case-Based Prediction of Teen Driver Behavior and Skill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Santiago Ontañón, Yi-Ching Lee, Sam Snodgrass, Dana Bonfiglio,
Flaura K. Winston, Catherine McDonald, and Avelino J. Gonzalez
Adapting Propositional Cases Based on Tableaux Repairs Using
Adaptation Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
Gabin Personeni, Alice Hermann, and Jean Lieber
Least Common Subsumer Trees for Plan Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
Antonio A. Sánchez-Ruiz and Santiago Ontañón
Supervised Semantic Indexing Using Sub-spacing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420
Sadiq Sani, Nirmalie Wiratunga, Stewart Massie, and Robert Lothian
Estimation of Machine Settings for Spinning of Yarns – New Algorithms
for Comparing Complex Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
Beatriz Sevilla-Villanueva, Miquel Sànchez-Marrè, and
Thomas V. Fischer
Linking Cases Up: An Extension to the Case Retrieval Network . . . . . . . . 450
Shubhranshu Shekhar, Sutanu Chakraborti, and Deepak Khemani
Acquisition and Reuse of Reasoning Knowledge from Textual Cases
for Automated Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
Gleb Sizov, Pinar Öztürk, and Jozef Štyrák
Enriching Case Descriptions Using Trails in Conversational
Recommenders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
Skanda Raj Vasudevan and Sutanu Chakraborti
Case-Based Plan Recognition Using Action Sequence Graphs . . . . . . . . . . 495
Swaroop S. Vattam, David W. Aha, and Michael W. Floyd
Combining Case-Based Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for Unit
Navigation in Real-Time Strategy Game AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
Stefan Wender and Ian Watson
Exploring the Space of Whole-Group Case Retrieval in Making Group
Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
David C. Wilson and Nadia A. Najjar

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

 What I Talk about When I Talk about CBR

Frode Sørmo

Verdande Technology, Trondheim, Norway

frode@verdandetechnology.com

Abstract. In the last two years, Verdande Technology has branched out from
our first application in monitoring drilling operations of oil and gas wells to
look at other use-cases of case-based reasoning (CBR). In particular, we have
looked at monitoring applications that use real-time sensor data and require a
person in the decision making loop.
This talk will briefly present our pre-existing use-case in oil & gas, as well
as two use cases from financial services and healthcare that were taken to the
prototype stage. In exploring these use cases as well as others that were not tak-
en as far, we have spoken to customers, end users, data scientists, industry ana-
lysts and managers in order to understand if CBR is or could be on their radar.
We present what we learned from these interactions, as well as how we learned
to talk about CBR to these different groups. Finally, we will ask what, if any-
thing, holds CBR back from the type of large scale industrial adoption we see
happening with rule-based systems and “analytics” technologies.
The oil & gas industry is going through a demographic shift in its workforce
that is known in the industry as the “Great Crew Change.” Due to an aging
workforce, a majority of the workers in many oil & gas firms are due to retire
over the next 5 to 10 years. At the same time, the number of wells and difficulty
of drilling are increasing as the easy oil has already been extracted. Today,
monitoring of drilling operations requires a highly skilled staff to monitor the
real-time sensor data from the rig in real-time, and the industry is seeking ways
to improve consistency and efficiency. Verdande Technology’s DrillEdge prod-
uct, which provides decision support for real-time monitoring of drilling opera-
tions, has been available in this market since 2009, and is now live on over 60
rigs across the world at any one time.
Ten years ago, a cardiovascular surgeon and an oil & gas manager met and
found that their jobs had more in common than what was obviously apparent.
The flow loops used to pump drilling fluid to circulate out cuttings use many of
the same flow models as the vascular system in the body, and these days small
drill strings are even used by surgeons to clear out arteries. Based on this in-
sight, the Pumps & Pipes conference was born as a technology sharing forum
for the oil & gas and healthcare industries. Verdande has worked with one of
the pioneers behind this conference, Dr. Alan Lumsden, to examine if case-
based reasoning can be used to monitor patients before, during and after open
heart surgery.
In financial trading, the potential revenue for those who react quickest is
great. Some years ago, it was found that it was possible to shave a few millise-
conds off the time it took a data signal to go from New York to Chicago by dig-
ging a trench as straight as possible between the two cities. This would be used

L. Lamontagne and E. Plaza (Eds.): ICCBR 2014, LNCS 8765, pp. 1–2, 2014.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
2 F. Sørmo

to run a direct fiber connection, thus cutting out switches and circuitous routes
and improving the latency slightly. However, the revenues gained through
speed are often at the expense of normal traders, such as day traders or pension
funds. To counter this trend, a small group of industry insiders decided to start a
new exchange, IEX, which would provide a fairer environment to traders. Ver-
dande Technology has worked with IEX to look at how to monitor an IT infra-
structure so sensitive to latency that shaving off a few milliseconds is worth a
$300M investment.
In exploring these use cases as well as others that were not taken as far, we
have spoken to customers, end users, data scientists, industry analysts and man-
agers across the healthcare, financial services and oil & gas industries. Typical-
ly, the first question we discussed with them was when it makes sense to con-
sider using case-based reasoning. In particular, we have often been asked to
compare how CBR relates to traditional rule-based systems and “analytics”
technologies. Rule-based systems have seen wide adoption, especially in the fi-
nancial services industry, and as such it is reasonably understood what they do
well and do less well. “Analytics” has become a buzz word for methods from
machine learning and statistics used to build predictive or descriptive models
from data. Tools and services around analytics are available from big vendors
such as Oracle, IBM and EMC, and they are actively marketing them as the so-
lution for what firms should do with the “Big Data” they have collected. We
have found knowledge of CBR among industry analysts and big IT organiza-
tions to be quite limited, even among technical people with a machine learning
or statistics background. That said, we have not found it difficult to explain why
case-based reasoning is an appropriate technology for many use cases. In par-
ticular, the advantage CBR has is how easy it is to understand the concept and
the reasoning process. We have seen so many potential use cases first hand that
we believe that there are uncountable potential applications out there for CBR.
Although there are a decent amount of CBR applications in use, many of the
applications out there now are created by companies with specialized expertise
in CBR or by internal teams in larger organizations that have a similar specia-
lized competence. In contrast, rule-based systems have now come to the point
where the internal IT organizations of large corporations routinely use them in
their own projects, or with help from big system integrators such as Accenture
or IBM, and “analytics” technologies are taking that step now. What would it
take for CBR to get this kind of industry adoption?
 Running with Scissors:
Cut-Ups, Boundary Friction and Creative Reuse

Tony Veale

School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin,

Belfield, Dublin D4, Ireland
Tony.Veale@UCD.ie
http://Afflatus.UCD.ie

Abstract. Our experience of past problems can offer valuable insights

into the solution of current problems, though since novel problems are not
merely re-occurrences of those we have seen before, their solutions require
us to integrate multiple sources of inspiration into a single, composite
whole. The degree to which the seams of these patchwork solutions are
evident to an end-user offers an inverse measure of the practical success
of the reuse process: the less visible its joins, the more natural a solution
is likely to seem. However, since creativity is neither an objective nor
an intrinsic property of a solution, but a subjective label ascribed by
a community, the more perceptible the tensions between parts, and the
more evident the wit that one must employ to ameliorate these tensions,
then the more likely we are to label a solution as creative. We explore here
the conceit that creative reuse is more than practical problem-solving: it
is reuse that draws attention to itself, by reveling in boundary friction.

Keywords: Boundary friction, incongruity resolution, semantic tension,

computational creativity, creative reuse.

1 Introduction
Robert Altman’s movie The Player opens with a glorious tracking shot that
swoops through the offices of a fictitious Hollywood film studio. Joining the
camera on its sweeping arcs, the audience is allowed to eavesdrop on insider
conversations that illuminate the Hollywood philosophy of filmmaking. In one
office we hear a group of technocrats discussing the longest and most impressive
tracking shots in the history of cinema, while in another we hear a writer pitching
a new idea to a studio executive. The writer frames his pitch as a high-concept
blend; this new film, he suggests, is best imagined as a cross between Ghost and
The Manchurian Candidate. Altman wants us to laugh at these scenes, to set the
tone for the sharp-edged parody to follow. For we can only marvel at why a writer
should want to marry elements from a then-recent blockbuster romance about

This work forms part of the EC-funded WHIM project (The What-If Machine). The
author would like to acknowledge the valuable contribution of his WHIM collaborator
Alessandro Valitutti to the work described in this paper.

L. Lamontagne and E. Plaza (Eds.): ICCBR 2014, LNCS 8765, pp. 3–16, 2014.

c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
4 T. Veale

a lovelorn ghost with aspects of a grim political thriller about brainwashing and
McCarthyism. Altman seems to be suggesting that Hollywood’s love of the high-
concept pitch, combined with a ruthless determination to recycle past successes,
has led to a cynical dumbing-down of its creative processes.
Hollywood has long sought to create familiar surprises by recombining past
successes in high-concept way ([1]). Consider Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese
film The Seven Samurai, which became the 1960 American Western The Magnifi-
cent Seven when sword-wielding samurai were re-imagined as heroic gun-slingers.
Kurosawa’s own Ran can also be seen as a Japanese reworking of Shakespeare’s
King Lear, though Shakespeare was hardly the first to repackage the Celtic leg-
end of Lir and his daughters. The 1961 musical West-Side Story is a Hollywood
reworking of Shakespeare’s 1594 play Romeo and Juliet, in which rival Verona
families the Montagues and the Capulets become the rival street-gangs of the
Jets and the Sharks. Baz Luhrman’s movie Romeo + Juliet is also a modern mu-
sical set amongst crime families in Verona beach, with most of its dialogue taken
directly from Shakespeare’s play. Surprisingly, the re-combination not only works
but excels, and big risks often produce the biggest rewards. Though cinematic
titans like Orson Welles had struggled and failed to film a worthy treatment
of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, the director Francis Ford Coppola
succeeded with his 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which transposed the action
from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia so as to critique the U.S.
role in the Vietnam war. In its own way, the 1994 film Forrest Gump also found
success by making Vietnam the centerpiece of its rather loose re-combination of
elements from Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide. The Coen brothers depression-era
comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou was also a rather loosely-based reworking
its classical source, Homer’s Odyssey, but the comedic re-combination works so
well that the film won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.
When stripped of their commercial motivation, the reuse mechanisms favored
by Hollywood studios bear a surprising similarity to the recombinant techniques
pioneered by the surrealist school of experimental art. The surrealists sought
more than a conscious disavowal of cliché; they sought a radical means of escap-
ing the deep-hewn ruts that unconsciously inhibit our spontaneity and creativity.
As William Burroughs put it, one “cannot will spontaneity into being”, but one
can “introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors”.
The scissors here alludes to the cut-up technique pioneered by Burroughs and
artist/writer Brion Gysin, in which a linear text is sliced, diced and randomly
re-spliced to form new texts that give rise to new and unexpected interpreta-
tions ([2]). The purpose of the cut-up technique is actually two-fold: not only
does it aim to create new combinations from old, much like the Hollywood sys-
tem, it also consciously aims to disrupt the mind’s attempts to automatically
group commonly co-occurring words and ideas into familiar gestalts. Unlike the
Hollywood approach, the technique embraces uncertainty and incongruity, and
aims to challenge rather than to comfort, to unsettle rather than to placate.
The cut-up technique was originally inspired by the collage movement in vi-
sual art, in which fragments of images and texts are re-combined to form a
 Running with Scissors 5

novel patchwork whole. When the cut-up technique is applied to a linear text,
the text is segmented into short strands of contiguous words that do not nec-
essarily respect either phrase or sentence boundaries. These strands are then
randomly recombined, to form a new text that uses the same words in different
linear juxtapositions, to facilitate – if one charitably overlooks the inevitable
bad grammar and illogical punctuation – very different global interpretations.
Gysin originally applied the technique to layers of newsprint, which he sliced
into linguistic chunks with a razor, and Burroughs later extended the technique
to audio tapes. In principle, any linear source of information, from text to audio
to video and even DNA, can be sliced and re-spliced using the cut-up technique
to deliberately subvert familiar patterns and spontaneously suggest new mean-
ings. Note, however, that the cut-up technique does not actually create new
meanings, and is “merely generative” in the purest sense. Rather, the goal of
the cut-up technique – and of related techniques developed by Burroughs, such
as the fold-in and the drop-in – is to generate candidates for interpretation that
an artist then evaluates, filters and ranks according to their creative potential.
By automatizing the production process in a way that frees it from the often
baleful effects of cliché, such techniques also free a creator to step back, observe,
and focus instead on the crucial acts of selection and evaluation. In other words,
these techniques are the arts-and-crafts equivalent of a generative algorithm

1.1 Boundary Friction

The cut-up technique has intriguing resonances with automatic approaches to

language processing, which also aim to understand complex texts by carving
them into smaller and more manageable chunks. For instance, boundary friction
is a problematic phenomenon observed in a case-based approach to machine
translation called “Example-Based Machine Translation” (or EBMT; see [3], [4],
[5]). In a typical EBMT system, a target-language translation of a text is stitched
together from a combination of pre-translated linguistic chunks that were pre-
viously extracted from a parallel bilingual corpus. While these chunks are inter-
nally coherent, the recombination of chunks can often give rise to cross-chunk
incoherencies. For example, a system may translate a novel source-language sen-
tence by combining a target-language chunk for its subject noun-phrase with
a target-language chunk for its verb-phrase. But if these NP and VP chunks,
derived from different translation contexts, now disagree on the grammatical
number of their head noun and head verb, this friction must be ameliorated
with an appropriate word-level change to achieve native fluency. Commercial
EBMT systems succeed or fail on their ability to reduce boundary frictions and
thus produce a fluent, natural translation. In contrast, the creation of boundary
friction is the very raison d’être of the cut-up technique, whose explicit goal is
the generation of texts whose juxtapositions are both challenging and surpris-
ing. It is rare that the cut-up technique generates fluent texts straight out of the
gate; though such outputs are possible, albeit with careful curation, the goal is
not simply to replace one natural text with another.
6 T. Veale

EBMT is most successfully applied in domains where there is a logical pro-

gression from past to present to future texts, as in the evolving documentation of
a maturing software product. Since present texts are known to the system and
exist in multiple translations, an EBMT system can carve out a collection of
reusable translation chunks by aligning parallel translations of the same source
texts. Though future texts are unknown and unseen, their subject matter is easy
to predict, so in an important sense the present allows the future to be predicted.
The general principle at work here – which sees the future as a functional re-
arrangement of the present – also applies to artistic cut-ups. By cutting and
re-arranging a text on a given subject, one is likely to produce another text on
a similar subject, albeit one with some provocative juxtapositions. Occasionally,
it is even possible that a cut-up produces a text that is not just a logical pro-
gression of the original, but a testable prediction of some future state of affairs.
Burroughs describes one such experiment with cut-ups, in which a text about
the oil billionaire John Paul Getty was randomly re-arranged to produce the sen-
tence “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” A year later, Burroughs claims,
the billionaire was indeed sued by one of his own sons. This is a hand-picked ex-
ample, one that shows the necessity of carefully filtering the generative products
of the cut-up technique, but it does show the capacity of cut-ups to bring into
focus the latent possibilities that implicitly reside in a text. Burroughs described
the relation between combinatorial generation and prediction thusly: “when you
cut into the present, the future leaks out.’ In truth, cut-ups are no more predic-
tive of the future than fortune cookies or horoscopes, yet if creativity is our goal,
spontaneity and unpredictability are often the better parts of generation when
placed in the hands of a selective creator.

1.2 Forgiven, Not Forgotten

An EBMT system that fails to resolve all of the frictions that arise at the bound-
aries of a patchwork translation is effectively creating more work for a human
post-editor. Though such frictions are primarily grammatical in nature, they
undermine a reader’s faith in the competence of a translation even if the gist
of its meaning is still apparent. In contrast, the cut-technique often produces
piecemeal texts that ask for a suspension of superficial grammatical rigour from
their readers, by posing an implicit bargain that promises conceptual rewards
at a deeper level of meaning. Whereas an EBMT system strives to produce a
target-language translation that would not look out of place in its original corpus
of target-language texts, the cut-up technique strives to produce novel compos-
ites that reside comfortably in none of its contributing corpora. EBMT systems
thus seek to obliterate the joins in its composite outputs, while instances of the
cut-up technique wear these joins proudly, as signifiers of creativity.
A cut-up text is a text of divided references, for it simultaneously evokes dif-
ferent viewpoints on the world as captured in different contributory fragments.
This rift may prompt a subtle convergence of views that goes unnoticed as a cre-
ative act, or it may force an unsubtle divergence that calls attention to itself as
a creative provocation. As Howard Pollio puts it, “split reference yields humour
 Running with Scissors 7

if the joined items (or the act joining them) emphasize the boundary or line sep-
arating them; split reference yields metaphor if the boundary between the joined
items (or the act joining them) is obliterated and the two items fuse to form a
single entity” [6]. While metaphor is so pervasive in language that speakers are
often unaware of just how much they rely on common figures of speech, the spell
of metaphor is easily broken, and with jarring effect, when metaphors are inju-
diciously mixed so as to clash at ill-fitting boundaries. Creative combinatorial
reuse resolves the tensions that arise between the components that contribute
to a solution, so that the resulting whole can achieve its intended goals, but it
does not obliterate all traces of these tensions. Rather, though the whole works,
it continues to surprise, by drawing attention to itself as an unnatural – albeit
useful – marriage of strange bedfellows. In humorous wit, as in ostentatious cre-
ativity more generally, one must not fail to address the internal tensions in a
juxtaposition of forms and ideas, but neither must one resolve them so utterly
that an audience does not recognize their influence, nor appreciate the means
of their resolution ([7], [8]). Such tensions are a vital part of how creativity
announces itself to an audience

1.3 Structure of This Paper

EBMT systems suffer from superficial boundary friction, which can diminish our
faith in the quality of a translation if not fully resolved. Creative applications
of the cut-up technique revel in deep boundary friction, at the semantic and
pragmatic levels of meaning rather than at the surface levels of language. In
this paper we will computationally explore the latter, deeper source of friction,
to generate cut-ups of our knowledge-representations that are non-obvious and
challenging, yet ultimately meaningful and occasionally even humorous, insight-
ful and profound.
In section two we introduce the notions of a knowledge cut-up and a conceptual
mash-up, to demonstrate that the surrealist cut-up technique can be applied as
much to our logical representations of knowledge as to our linguistic realizations
of this knowledge in text. To a computer, after all, a symbolic knowledge repre-
sentation is merely another kind of symbolic text, albeit one that is unambiguous
and logically-privileged. In section three we describe a novel, inferential use of
these new techniques, and describe, in section four, how inferential cut-ups form
the basis of a creative, fully-automated Twitterbot. Section five then uses the
outputs of this system to obtain some initial experimental findings regarding the
kinds of boundary friction that are most satisfying to human audiences. The pa-
per concludes in section six with some closing observations about the creativity
of compositional reuse.

2 Knowledge Cut-Ups and Conceptual Mash-Ups

The mechanics of the cut-up technique are easily automated, though superficial
boundary friction abounds when the technique is randomly applied to raw texts.
8 T. Veale

The more informative the mark-up that can be extracted from a text, the more
well-formed the outputs can be. Consider a twitterbot called Two Headlines by
bot-designer Darius Kazemi (Twitter handle @twoheadlines), which does exactly
what its name suggests. Two random headlines from today’s news, as provided
by a popular news aggregator, are mashed together to yield a headline that
is well-formed yet factually provocative. Because the source headlines contain
additional mark-up that identifies the named-entities in the text – whether Justin
Bieber or Barack Obama or Google or Italy – it is a simple matter to mix-and-
match the entities from two headlines into one without introducing any boundary
friction at the grammatical level. The goal, of course, is to introduce friction at
the conceptual level by, for example, associating Justin Bieber with momentous
international political decisions or scientific discoveries, or Barack Obama with
the laughable or criminal indiscretions of pampered celebrities. The resulting
headline often produces what Koestler ([9]) terms a “bisociation”, a clash of two
overlapping but conflicting frames of reference that is jarring but meaningful.
The more mark-up present in the input texts, the more insight that can be
gleaned about their structure and their meaning, and so the more informed the
decisions that a computational cut-up agent can make when creating a new
text. The most informative texts are those that explicitly define the knowl-
edge possessed by a computer for a particular domain: that is, the computer’s
own symbolic knowledge representations. For example, these representations are
commonly structured around the notion of a semantic triple, in which a logical
subject is linked to a logical object by an explicit semantic relation. These triples
carve up the world at its joints, but it is an easy matter to further cut-up these
triples at their joints, to mix-and-match subjects, relations and objects from
different triples into provocative new hypotheses, in much the same way that
@twoheadlines serves up a bisociative mix of today’s news headlines. The triples
in question can come from any generic triple-store on the Semantic Web, or they
may form part of the bespoke knowledge-base for an AI/NLP reasoning system.
Consider the triples harvested by Veale and Li ([10], [11]) from the texts of the
Web. These authors glean completions to common why do questions from the
Google search engine, such as “why do dogs chase cats”, ‘why do philosophers ask
questions” and ‘why do poets use rhyme”. They then extract the implicit consen-
sus presupposition at the core of each question (such as e.g. that most poets use
rhyme, imagery and metaphor) and automatically convert each presupposition
into an explicit semantic triple (such as < poet, use, metaphor >).
These triples are grist for a metaphor interpretation and generation system
named Metaphor Eyes. Suppose Metaphor Eyes were to consider the metaphori-
cal potential of viewing philosophers as poets. The system generates knowledge-
level cut-ups from the triples it possesses for poet by replacing the subject poet
with the subject philosopher in each poet triple. This simple, generative action
is then followed by a validation phase that automatically evaluates each of the
newly-produced cut-up triples, by looking to the Web for evidence that the new
triple captures a relationship that is attested in one or more Web texts. Thus, the
cut-up that “philosophers use metaphors” is attested by a Web search that finds
 Running with Scissors 9

hundreds of supporting documents. But Metaphor Eyes does more than generate
and test cut-ups for a given pairing of concepts: it suggests interesting pairings
for itself, by examining how words and ideas are clustered in a large text corpus
such as the Google n-grams ([12]). Thus, since poets and philosophers are seen
in sufficiently frequent proximity to each other, and each is found in proximity
to ideas that are related to the other (such as metaphor, or idea, or argument ),
Metaphor Eyes actively suggests the pairing of poets and philosophers to the
user, and proceeds to generate a Web-validated knowledge cut-up as its output.
Metaphor Eyes fluidly plays with the boundaries between knowledge and text,
moving between one and the other to extract maximum reuse value from each.
Veale and Li also explore the potential of metaphorical cut-ups to plug gaps
in a system’s knowledge representation of the world. Suppose a system possesses
little or no knowledge about philosophers, but possesses knowledge about con-
cepts that are not so far removed, such as scholars, theologians, scientists and
poets. Metaphor Eyes combines triples from neighboring concepts to mash to-
gether a proxy representation for philosopher, by combining the Web-validated
triples for the cut-ups philosopher as scholar (each accumulates and applies
knowledge, each performs research), philosopher as theologian (each spreads doc-
trines), philosopher as scientist (each develops and explores ideas) and philoso-
pher as poet (each nurtures ideals). The resulting set of cut-up triples from di-
verse sources is called a “conceptual mash-up”, and Veale and Li rank the triples
in a mash-up according to how much Web evidence can be found for each. They
demonstrate empirically that the top-ranked triples in a mash-up have a high
probability of being attested in real Web texts, and show that a mash-up is a
good substitute for human-engineered knowledge in an AI system. Like human
users of the cut-up technique, they explore the space of ideas with a scissors.

3 Inferential Cut-Ups Lead to Surprising Conclusions

Creative producers are masters of ambiguity. They make the most of the ambigu-
ity in their inputs, and induce ambiguity in their outputs to foster indeterminism
and the emergence of new, unexpected meanings. The cut-up technique is de-
signed to unleash the latent ambiguity in an otherwise business-as-usual text,
such as a news story or a well-thumbed novel. In a knowledge-based computa-
tional setting, ambiguity allows a system to transcend one of its most vexing
limitations: the knowledge that comprises most AI systems is safe knowledge,
facts and rules that most informed users would consider to be true if they ever
gave the matter any thought. So how does one go from safe premises to con-
clusions that can genuinely surprise us, and that force us to view the world
anew from a very different perspective? The ancient sophists were masters of
using familiar knowledge to reach desirable ends, and even Socrates, who openly
disdained the sophists, practiced similar techniques for nobler ends: by linking
familiar assumptions in the right order, a sophisticated thinker can lead an audi-
ence from their safe moorings in received wisdom into new, uncharted territories.
Suppose we ponder the dystopian scenario of a “world without beauty”? Since
Beauty is an unqualified positive in most world-views, and most knowledge-bases
10 T. Veale

that address the matter at all will axiomatize it using other positive qualities
such as Art and Love, most of us (and our systems) will initially conclude that
a world without beauty would be a much-diminished place to live. Yet a good
repository of common-sense knowledge will also capture the relationship between
Beauty and Jealousy, noting that the former often causes the latter. Jealousy, in
turn, promotes Hate and Conflict, with the latter sometimes escalating to the
level of War. A good sophist might thus conclude – and show how others might
reasonably reach this conclusion for themselves – that a world without beauty
might be a world with less jealousy, less hate, and less war. A world without
beauty might, in fact, be a desirable place to live.
The elements of this causal chain are unassuming semantic triples of a knowl-
edge base, and none have been subjected to the dislocations of the cut-up tech-
nique. Yet the chain as a whole can be viewed as a cut-up in its own right, akin
to a newspaper cut-up that reuses whole sentences as its building blocks rather
than the phrasal sub-components of these sentences. The guiding principle of
such a cut-up is to produce a surprising conclusion from the most unsurprising
premises, much as Socrates and his followers, and their rivals the sophists, did in
ancient Athens. Such a process can also be modeled on a computer, as computers
excel at pursuing inferential chains to their logical ends. Each successive link in
a chain may exhibit little or no boundary friction with the link that goes before
or the link that comes after, but the cumulative effect will be to produce a very
evident friction between the first and last links in the chain.
The potential for semantic and pragmatic friction between the end-points of
a chain is increased if one is willing to use a sophist’s disregard for logical rigor
when adding new links to the chain. Consider < dictator, suppress, critic >,
a triple which captures the widespread belief that dictators censure their crit-
ics, or worse. A system that also believes that < critic, criticize, artist > and
< artist, produce, art > may well construct an inferential chain from dictators
to art via critics and artists, to infer that dictators indirectly promote art by
thwarting the critics that impede its producers. Such a chain embodies a surpris-
ing claim, that more dictators lead to more art, but it is predicated on several
acts of sophistry. Firstly, critics come in multiple guises, and the political crit-
ics that decry a regime are not typically the same as those that criticize art.
Secondly, to criticize is not always to hinder or deter. Thirdly, art critics do
more than criticize, and often encourage artists too. Lastly, even if the inferen-
tial chain can be taken at face value, it says nothing about whether dictators
promote more good art. These may be considered the weak points of the causal
argument, but they may also be seen as the resolution of the semantic friction –
between bad dictators and good art – that gives the argument its shock value.
One man’s sophistry may well be another’s semantic slippage ([13]). In either
case, inference chains that exhibit deep friction often prove to be surprising in
ways that make us think about what we know.
This notion of deep friction in an inferential chain may be operationalized in
different ways, but the simplest and most effective employs the affective profile of
the concepts concerned. Art and Beauty are positive concepts, and are denoted
 Running with Scissors 11

by words with a strong positive sentiment. Dictators and Critics are negative
concepts, and are denoted by words with a strong negative sentiment. It follows
that more art, more beauty and fewer critics should be considered positive out-
comes, just as less art, less beauty and more dictators should be considered a
negative outcome. An inferential chain that shows how a positive outcome can
be derived from a negative cause (such more art from more dictators), or how a
negative outcome can be derived from a positive cause (such as more war from
more beauty) thus exhibits a deep friction between its initial premises and its
final conclusion. This friction poses a challenge to an audience – how can this be
so? – that must be resolved meaningfully, either by accepting the conclusion at
face value or by identifying the sophistry at its heart. In either case, the audience
is aware of both the friction and its resolution; indeed, the resolution actively
draws our attention to the friction, and draws us into its worldview.

4 Creative Twitterbots
Twitterbots are fully-automated, generative systems whose outputs are designed
to be distributed via the micro-blogging service Twitter. Though easily dismissed
as trivial, Twitterbots embody all of the anarchic spirit of the cut-up technique
and of the conceptual artists that created it. Consider again the @twoheadlines
bot, which uses the cut-up technique just as Burroughs and Gysin imagined it,
to “introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor ” into our readings of the daily
news. However, as a simple, uncurated system, @twoheadlines captures only the
generative part of the cut-up process, and omits the vital reflection phase in
which candidate outputs are ranked, evaluated and then chosen or discarded by
an intelligent agent with creative intent. Though a productive system, @twohead-
lines is ultimately a “merely generative” system that lacks any self-appreciation,
and cannot thus be considered a computationally creative agent.
In contrast, @MetaphorMagnet is a Twitterbot that employs the knowledge
cut-ups of section 2 (via the computational service Metaphor Eyes) and the
inferential cut-ups of section 3 to produce metaphorical insights that are carefully
evaluated and filtered by the system itself. @MetaphorMagnet is not merely a
generative system; rather, it is a system that only tweets metaphors that it
considers to be well-formed and thought-provoking, the latter quality arising out
of its deliberate use of resolvable, causal boundary friction. The bot generates
a new metaphorical insight every hour, based on its explorations of its own
sizable knowledge-base of semantic triples. Because these explorations allow it
to detect deep frictions between its own knowledge of the world – knowledge
that it believes most humans will also possess – @MetaphorMagnet has a sharp
eye for hypocrisy and disappointment that is well-suited to ironic commentary.
Consider these representative tweets:
#Irony: When the initiates that learn about engaging mysteries partic-
ipate in boring rituals. #EngagingOrBoring #Initiate
Writers write metaphors. Dictators suppress the critics that criticize the
authors that write metaphors. Who is better? #DictatorOrWriter
12 T. Veale

Slavery imposes the shackles that impose bonds. Marriage creates the
attachments that create bonds. Take your pick. #MarriageOrSlavery?

Truth provides the knowledge that underpins arts. Illusion enhances the
beauty that underpins arts. Take your pick. #TruthOrIllusion?

#Irony: When the tests that are conducted in tidy laboratories are con-
ducted by rumpled professors. #TidyOrRumpled #Test

Twitter’s 140-character size limitation per tweet imposes obvious limitations

on the length of the inferential chains that can be entertained by the system,
though its biggest challenge is not the size of its search horizon, nor the size of its
knowledge-base, but the breadth of its repertoire for expressing new insights in
suggestive forms. The best Twitterbots exhibit an identifiable aesthetic and an
identifiable world-view, in much the same way that human Twitter users exude
an identifiable personality. @MetaphorMagnet exudes a distinctly hard-boiled
personality through its causal linking of positive and negative concepts. As shown
in the #MarriageOrSlavery and #TruthOrIllusion tweets above, @Metaphor-
Magnet is a sophist that assumes moral equivalence wherever it can demonstrate
an apparent causal equivalence. We leave it to other Twitterbots to present a
more positive and uplifting view of the world.

5 Half-Baked vs. Deep-Fried: Comparing Friction Types

We have hypothesized that certain forms of boundary friction are inherently
valuable, insofar as they signal not so much a lapse in combinatorial finesse
by a computational system, but a conceptual challenge that draws an audience
into the creative act itself. Superficial friction typically arises either as a loose-
end – a flaw overlooked by a careless or inept creator that detracts from his
or her achievement – or as a weak attempt at generating a mere frisson of
semantic tension. Deep friction, like a gnashing of conceptual gears, is both
surprising yet appropriate, a piquant insight emerging from a plate of bland
generalizations. We test this claim in the context of inferential cut-ups by using
a crowd-sourcing platform to elicit the feedback of human judges. But we do not
present judges with the polished outputs of @MetaphorMagnet, as this twitterbot
carefully packages its tweets in a variety of rhetorical guises that may influence a
judge’s perception of the underlying reasoning. Rather, judges are presented with
inferential chains in unpolished, quantitative forms, so e.g. the chain dictators
suppress the critics that criticize the artists that produce art is presented simply
as more dictators → fewer critics → more artists → more art.
Inferential chains are randomly generated from the underlying knowledge-
base to support three different test conditions. In the first condition, the random
condition, inferential chains of connected generalizations are produced without
regard to whether they contain any kind of friction at all. These chains are log-
ically well-formed, but no interestingness criterion is applied as a filter. In the
second condition, the surface condition, chains of connected generalizations are
 Running with Scissors 13

produced so that the first and last concepts in the chain exhibit a polar oppo-
sition in sentiment, such as love vs. war or art vs. death. Any friction in these
chains is most likely the product of superficial differences in sentiment between
connected concepts, rather than of a surprising twist of causality. In the third
condition, the deep condition, inference chains are produced that exhibit pre-
cisely this kind of causal friction, so that a positive idea (such as more beauty)
is shown to indirectly have negative consequences (such as more war ), or a neg-
ative idea (such as more war ) is shown to indirectly have positive consequences
(such as more patriotism or more prosperity)
A pool of 80 inferential chains was randomly generated for each condition, 30
of which (per condition) were manually annotated as a gold standard to detect
scammers, and 50 of which (per condition) were finally annotated by independent
judges. The crowd-sourcing platform CrowdFlower was used to recruit a panel
of 70 human judges to estimate, for each of these 3x50 inference chains, the
degree of surprise exhibited by each. The full inferential pathway was presented
in each case, so that judges could see not only its conceptual end-points, but
the coarse logic at work in each link of the chain. The gold standard paths were
used to detect unengaged scammers, resulting in 2.5% of judgments overall being
discarded. Ultimately, 50 chains for each condition were judged by 15 or more
judges, producing 765 judgments for the random condition, 751 for the surface
condition, and 750 for the deep condition. Each elicited judgment provided a
measure of surprise on a scale from 0 (no surprise) to 3 (very surprising) for a
given inference chain.
The mean surprise value for the 765 judgments of the random condition is
1.06, that for the 751 judgments of the surface condition is 0.96, and that for
the 750 judgments for the deep condition is 1.44. There is little here to distin-
guish the chains of the random condition from those of the surface condition,
suggesting that combinations that rely only on superficial differences in form,
rather than on deep differences in causality, fail to reliably elicit any interest.
However, as we have hypothesized, there is a statistically significant difference
in surprisingness between, on one hand, the chains of the surface and random
conditions, and on the other, those of the deep condition. A one-sided Wilcoxon
rank-sum test verifies that the increase in mean surprisingness from the surface
and random conditions to the deep condition is significant at the p < .001 level.
To be surprised one must have prior expectations that are thwarted in some way.
Surprise turns to fascination when initial dissonance gives way, after some con-
sideration, to a deeper resonance of ideas. The inventors of the cut-up technique
did not want to generate jarring combinations for their own sake, but to produce
meaningful bisociations that break with banality. So to be appreciated as “cre-
ative”, combinatorial reuse systems must do more than seek out combinations
that work; they must seek out combinations that work in spite of themselves.

6 Conclusions
Creative thinkers must constantly question received wisdom, and look beyond
the superficial, isolated meaning of consensus beliefs. Creative thinkers actively
14 T. Veale

seek out boundary friction whenever different texts, ideas, viewpoints or rules are
combined, because this friction allows one to see wherever convention has fixed
the acceptable boundaries of everyday categories. By identifying the boundaries
of the conventional mindset, a creative thinker can break set and search for
untapped value beyond those boundaries. Though certain forms of boundary
friction are vexing issues to be resolved away, others offer a map to what is
novel, unexpected and interesting.
The recombinant elements of past solutions rarely click together as cleanly
as Lego bricks, but for that we should be thankful. Combinatorial reuse is a
well-proven strategy for problem-solving that offers many opportunities for cre-
ative friction, at various levels of resolution. Reusable solution elements can
range from individual words or concepts to heftier chunks of meaning or text
to physical artefacts that exhibit different functionalities in different contexts.
The artist provocateur Marcel Duchamp introduced the notion of a creative
readymade to art when, in 1917, when he displayed a signed urinal (christened
“Fountain”) at a Dadaist art exhibition in New York. Duchamp shifted the em-
phasis of artistic production from the act of original generation to the act of
aesthetic selection, arguing that the artifacts at the core of the artistic process
need not be constructed by the artists themselves ([14]). Duchamp used physical
objects, constructed by skilled artisans, as his “readymades”, but Burroughs and
Gysin were to show that any object, physical or textual or conceptual, could be
creatively re-purposed and re-used as a readymade in a new context. By view-
ing the phrasal elements of a text database such as the Google n-grams ([12])
as a database of reusable elements that gain new meanings in new contexts,
algorithms can create and exploit linguistic readymades of their own ([11], [15]).
Reusable elements may themselves by complex software components that
strive for creativity in their own right. The creative friction that spurs innova-
tion from antagonistic partners, of a kind that is well-attested by famous creative
human partnerships, may also be evident in the qualities that arise from pro-
ductive mash-ups of independent Web-services. A service oriented architecture
([16]) supports combinatorial reuse at multiple levels of resolution, and allows
boundary friction to subtly influence the creativity of the end-result at each of
these levels. For instance, other creative systems may use the outputs of the
@MetaphorMagnet twitterbot as inputs to their own generative processes, or
they may call directly upon the corresponding Metaphor Magnet Web-service to
ask for specific kinds of metaphors for specific topics ([17], [18]). Web-services
allow us to convert the generative components of past successes into stand-
alone, modular, reusable, discoverable, generative engines in their own right.
These services will exploit their own internal forms of boundary friction, much
as the Metaphor Magnet Web-service exploits its own, intra-service notion of
semantic tension to generate exciting new metaphors. But they will also give
rise to higher-level, inter-service frictions that are harder to predict but just as
useful to exploit. In a thriving ecosystem of competing Web services, creativ-
ity will arise not just from the carefully planned interactions of these services
– whether for metaphor generation, language translation, story-telling, affective
 Running with Scissors 15

filtering, multimodal conversion, and so on – but from the unplanned frictions

that emerge from the less-than-seamless integration of these services. In such
complex systems of imperfectly described, underspecified modules, the potential
for boundary friction abounds at every level, offering opportunities for creativity
all the way down. William Burroughs viewed his scissors as a deliberate instiga-
tor of boundary friction. We too can harness boundary friction to “introduce the
unpredictable spontaneous factor ” into our combinatorial reuse systems to make
them more genuinely creative.

References
1. Veale, T.: Creativity as pastiche: A computational treatment of metaphoric blends,
with special reference to cinematic “borrowing”. In: Proceedings of the Mind II:
Computational Models of Creative Cognition, Dublin, Ireland (1997)
2. Robinson, E.S.: Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to
the Present. Rudolphi, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2011)
3. Sumita, E., Iida, H., Kohyama, H.: Translating With Examples: A new approach to
Machine Translation. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on The-
oretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Language,
Austin, Texax, USA (1990)
4. Veale, T., Way, A.: Gaijin: A template-driven bootstrapping approach to example-
based machine translation. In: Proc. NeMNLP Conference on New Methods in
Natural Language Processessing, Bulgaria (1997)
5. Way, A., Gough, N.: wEBMT: developing and validating an example-based machine
translation system using the world wide web. Computational Linguistics 29(3),
421–457 (2003)
6. Pollio, H.R.: Boundaries in humor and metaphor. In: Mio, J.S., Katz, A.N. (eds.)
Metaphor, Implications and Applications, pp. 231–253. Lawrence Erlbaum Asso-
ciates, Mahwah (1996)
7. Raskin, V.: Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Reidel, Dordrecht (1985)
8. Attardo, S., Hempelmann, C.F., Di Maio, S.: Script oppositions and logical mecha-
nisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. Humor: International Journal
of Humor Research 15(1), 3–46 (2002)
9. Koestler, A.: The Act of Creation. Hutchinsons, London (1964)
10. Veale, T., Li, G.: Creative Introspection and Knowledge Acquisition: Learning
about the world through introspective questions and exploratory metaphors. In:
Burgard, W., Roth, D. (eds.) Proc. of 25th AAAI International Conference of the
Association for the Advancement of AI, San Francisco, California (2011)
11. Veale, T.: Exploding the Creativity Myth: The computational foundations of lin-
guistic creativity. Bloomsbury Academic, London (2012)
12. Brants, T., Franz, A.: Web 1T 5-gram Ver. 1. Linguistic Data Consortium (2006)
13. Hofstadter, D.R.: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the
Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Basic Books, New York (1995)
14. Taylor, M.R.: Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Yale
University Press (2009)
15. Veale, T.: Linguistic Readymades and Creative Reuse. Transactions of the SDPS:
Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science 17(4), 37–51 (2013)
16. Erl, T.: SOA: Principles of Service Design. Prentice Hall (2008)
16 T. Veale

17. Veale, T.: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Computational Creativity. Journal

of Computing Science and Engineering 7(3), 159–167 (2013)
18. Veale, T.: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Metaphor Processing. In: Proc. of
the 2nd ACL Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, at ACL 2014, the 52nd Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Baltimore, USA (2014)

Appendix: Online Resources

Metaphor Magnet exists as both a Twitterbot, which pushes metaphors of its

own invention, and as a public Web-Service, which generates specific families of
metaphors for specific topics, on demand, via a HTML and an XML Web inter-
face. It also provides other creative products, such as poems and blends, for these
metaphors. This service can be accessed at: http://boundinanutshell.com/
metaphor-magnet-acl
 Learning Solution Similarity
in Preference-Based CBR

Amira Abdel-Aziz1 , Marc Strickert1 , and Eyke Hüllermeier2

1
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Marburg, Germany
{amira,strickert}@mathematik.uni-marburg.de
2
Department of Computer Science
University of Paderborn, Germany
eyke@upb.de

Abstract. This paper is a continuation of our recent work on preference-

based CBR, or Pref-CBR for short. The latter is conceived as a case-
based reasoning methodology in which problem solving experience is
represented in the form of contextualized preferences, namely preferences
for candidate solutions in the context of a target problem to be solved.
In our Pref-CBR framework, case-based problem solving is formalized as
a preference-guided search process in the space of candidate solutions,
which is equipped with a similarity (or, equivalently, a distance) mea-
sure. Since the efficacy of Pref-CBR is influenced by the adequacy of
this measure, we propose a learning method for adapting solution sim-
ilarity on the basis of experience gathered by the CBR system in the
course of time. More specifically, our method makes use of an underlying
probabilistic model and realizes adaptation as Bayesian inference. The
effectiveness of this method is illustrated in a case study that deals with
the case-based recommendation of red wines.
Keywords: Preferences, distance, similarity learning, probabilistic mo-
deling, Bayesian inference.

1 Introduction
Building on recent research on preference handling in artificial intelligence, we
recently started to develop a coherent and generic methodological framework for
case-based reasoning (CBR) on the basis of formal concepts and methods for
knowledge representation and reasoning with preferences, referred to as Pref-
CBR [6,8,5]. A preference-based approach to CBR appears to be appealing for
several reasons, notably because case-based experiences naturally lend them-
selves to representations in terms of preferences over candidate solutions. More-
over, the flexibility and expressiveness of a preference-based formalism well ac-
commodate the uncertain and approximate nature of case-based problem solving.
Like many other CBR approaches, Pref-CBR proceeds from a formal frame-
work consisting of a problem space X and a solution space Y. Yet, somewhat
less common, it assumes a similarity (or distance) measure to be defined not

L. Lamontagne and E. Plaza (Eds.): ICCBR 2014, LNCS 8765, pp. 17–31, 2014.

c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
18 A. Abdel-Aziz, M. Strickert, and E. Hüllermeier

only on X but also on Y. Moreover, it assumes a strong connection between the

notions of preference and similarity. More specifically, for each problem x ∈ X,
it assumes the existence of a theoretically ideal solution1 y ∗ ∈ Y, and the less
another solution y differs from y ∗ in the sense of a distance measure ΔY , the
more this solution is preferred.
As a consequence, the performance and effectiveness of Pref-CBR is strongly
influenced by the distance measure ΔY : The better this measure captures the
true differences between solutions, the more effective Pref-CBR will be. In this
paper, we therefore extend our framework through the integration of a distance
learning module. Thus, the idea is to make use of the experience collected in a
problem solving episode, not only to extend the case base through memorization
of preferences, but also to adapt the distance measure ΔY .
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. By way of background, and to
assure a certain level of self-containedness, we recall the essentials of Pref-CBR
in the next section. Our approach to learning solution similarity in Pref-CBR is
then presented in Section 3 and illustrated by means of two simulation studies
in Section 4. The paper ends with some concluding remarks and an outlook on
future work in Section 5.

2 Preference-Based CBR
Preference-based CBR replaces experiences of the form “solution y (optimally)
solves problem x”, as commonly used in CBR, by weaker information of the form
“y is better (more preferred) than z as a solution for x”, that is, by a preference
between two solutions contextualized by a problem x. More specifically, the basic
“chunk of information” we consider is symbolized in the form y x z and
suggests that, for the problem x, the solution y is supposedly at least as good
as z.
As argued in [5], this type of knowledge representation overcomes several
problems of more common approaches to CBR. In particular, the representation
of experience is less demanding: As soon as two candidate solutions y and z
have been tried as solutions for a problem x, these two alternatives can be
compared and, correspondingly, a strict preference in favor of one of them (or
an indifference) can be expressed. To this end, it is neither required that one of
these solutions is optimal, nor that their suitability is quantified in terms of a
numerical utility.

2.1 A Formal Framework

In the following, we assume the problem space X to be equipped with a similarity
measure SX : X × X → R+ or, equivalently, with a (reciprocal) distance measure
ΔX : X × X → R+ . Thus, for any pair of problems x, x ∈ X, their similarity is
denoted by SX (x, x ) and their distance by ΔX (x, x ). Likewise, we assume the
1
As will be explained in more detail in Section 2, this solution might be fictitious and
perhaps impossible to be materialized.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
also, yet in its absence it is not likely that it kept either valuables
or money at Westminster. But side by side with the state office
was the household office of finance, the Wardrobe, and, though
the wardrobe office was itinerating with the king, it still kept a
“treasury” or storehouse at Westminster, and this, for the sake of
greater safety, had been placed for some years at least within
the precincts of the abbey. From the monastic point of view, it
was doubtless an inconvenience that nearness to the royal
dwelling compelled them to offer their premises for the royal
service. Accordingly, kings not infrequently made demands upon
the abbey to use its buildings. Thus the chapter house became a
frequent place for meetings of parliament, and at a later time it
was used and continued to be used till the nineteenth century, for
the storage of official records. In the same way Edward secured
the crypt underneath the chapter house as one of the
storehouses of his Wardrobe. When the crypt was first used for
this purpose I do not know, but records show us that it was
already in use in 1291, at which date it was newly paved. It was
not the only storehouse of the Wardrobe. There was another
“treasury of the wardrobe” in the Tower of London, but this was
mainly used for bulky articles, arms and armour, cloth, furs,
furniture, and the like. Most of what we should call treasure was
deposited in the Westminster crypt, and we are fortunate in
having still extant a list of the jewels preserved there in 1298, the
time when the court began to establish itself for its five years’
sojourn in the north. In 1303 jewels and plate were still the chief
treasures preserved there. Some money was there also, notably
a store of “gold florins of Florence,” the only gold coins currently
used in England at a time when the national mints limited
themselves to the coinage of silver. But I do not think there could
have been much money, for Edward’s needs were too pressing,
his financial policy too much from hand to mouth, for the crypt at
Westminster to be a hoard of coined money, like the famous
Prussian Kriegsschatz at Spandau, which, we now rejoice to
learn, is becoming rapidly depleted. Whatever its contents,
Edward estimated that their value was £100,000, a sum
equivalent to a year’s revenue of the English state in ordinary
times. Unluckily mediaeval statistics are largely mere guess-work.
But the amount of the guess at least suggests the feeling that
the value of the treasures stored in the crypt was very
considerable.
The crypt under the chapter house is one of the most
interesting portions of the abbey buildings at Westminster. It is
little known because it is not, I think, generally shown to visitors.
I am indebted to the kindness of my friend, Bishop Ryle, the
present dean, for an opportunity of making a special inspection of
it. It is delightfully complete, and delightfully unrestored. The chief
new thing about it seems the pavement, but the dean’s well-
informed verger told me that it was within living memory that this
pavement had replaced the flooring of 1291. Numerous windows
give a fair amount of light to the apartment; though the enormous
thickness of the walls, some thirteen feet, it was said, prevent the
light being very abundant, even on a bright day. The central
column, the lower part of the great pillar from which radiates the
high soaring vaults of the chapter house above, alone breaks the
present emptiness of the crypt. Considerable portions of the
column are cut away to form a series of neatly made recesses,
and there are recesses within these recesses, which suggest in
themselves careful devices for secreting valuables, for it would be
easy to conceal them by the simple expedient of inserting a
stone here and there where the masonry had been cut away, and
so suggesting to the unwary an unbroken column. I should not
like to say that these curious store-places already existed in
1303; but there is no reason why they should not. Certainly they
fit in admirably with the use of the crypt as a treasury.
One other point we must also remember about the
dispositions of this crypt. There is only one access to it, and that
is neither from the chapter house above nor from the adjacent
cloister, but from the church itself. A low, vaulted passage is
entered by a door at the south-east corner of the south transept
of the abbey, now for many centuries the special burial place for
poets, eminent and otherwise. This passage descends by a flight
of steep steps to the crypt itself, and the flight originally seems, I
am told—doubtless as another precaution against robbery—to
have been a broken one suggesting that a steep drop,
presumably spanned by a short ladder, further barred access to
the crypt. We must remember, too, that this sole access to the
treasury was within a few feet of the sacristy of the abbey. The
sacristy was the chapel to the south of the south transept, and
communicating with it where the sacrist kept the precious vessels
appropriated to the service of the altar. Altogether it looks as if
the crypt were originally intended as a storehouse for such
church treasure as the sacrist did not need for his immediate
purposes. From this use it was diverted, as we have seen, to the
keeping of the royal treasures. Nowadays the sacristy is called
the chapel of St. Faith and is used for purposes of private
devotion. We must not forget the close connexion in our period of
the sacristy and the crypt. The connexion becomes significant
when we remember that among Pudlicott’s monastic boon
companions at the palace-keeper’s lodge was the sacrist of the
abbey, Adam of Warfield.
Pudlicott had made up his mind to steal the king’s treasure.
The practical problem was how to get access to it. If we examine
the evidence collected at the enquiry, we find that there are two
discrepant accounts as to how the robber effected his purpose.
The one is warranted by the testimony of a large number of
sworn juries of reputable citizens of every ward in the city of
London, of burgesses of Westminster, and of the good men of
every hundred in the adjacent shires of Middlesex and Surrey. It
is—like much truthful evidence—rather vague, but its general
tendency is, while recognizing that Pudlicott is the prime offender,
to make various monks and palace officers his accomplices. Of
the latter category William of the Palace seems to have been the
most active, while of the many monks Adam Warfield the sacrist
was the most generally denounced. But the proved share of both
Adam and William was based largely on the discovery of stolen
property in their possession. The evidence of the juries suggests
theories as to how the crime may have been perpetrated; it does
not make the methods of the culprits clear and palpable. But it
suggests that masons and carpenters were called in, so that
some breaking in of the structure was attempted, and in particular
it suggests that the churchyard was the thoroughfare through
which the robbers removed their booty.

Let us turn next to Pudlicott’s own confession, that remarkable

document from which I have already borrowed many details,
though seldom without a word of warning. According to his
confession, Pudlicott, having resolved to rob the treasury, came to
the conclusion that the best way to tackle the business was to
pierce a hole through the wall of thirteen feet of stone that
supported the lower story of the chapter house. For so colossal a
task time was clearly needed. Richard accordingly devoted
himself during the dark nights of winter and early spring to drilling
through the solid masonry. He attacked the building from the
churchyard or eastern side, having access thereto from the
palace. But the churchyard was open to the parish and the thrifty
churchwardens of St. Margaret’s had let to a neighbouring
butcher the right of grazing his sheep in it. Now the butcher was
told that his privilege was withdrawn, and passers-by were sent
round by another path. This was a precaution against the casual
wayfarer seeing the hole which was daily growing larger. To hide
from the casual observer the great gash in the stonework,
Richard tells us that he sowed hempseed in the churchyard near
the hole, and that this grew so rapidly that the tender hemp
plants not only hid the gap in the wall, but provided cover for him
to hide the spoils he hoped to steal from the treasury. When the
hole was complete on 24 April, Pudlicott went through and found
to his delight that the chamber was full of baskets, chests, and
other vessels for holding valuables, plate, relics, jewels, and gold
florins of Florence. Richard remained in the crypt gloating over
the treasure surrounding him from the evening of 24 April to the
morning of 26 April. Perhaps he found it impossible to tear
himself away from so much wealth; or perhaps the intervening
day, being the feast of St. Mark, there were too many people
about, and too many services in the abbey to make his retreat
secure. However, he managed on the morning of 26 April to get
away, taking with him as much as he could carry. He seems to
have dropped, or to have left lying about, a good deal that he
was unable to carry, possibly for his friends to pick up.

Such is Pudlicott’s story. It is the tale of a bold ruffian who

glories in his crime, and is proud to declare “I alone did it”. But
there was a touch of heroism and of devotion in our hero thus
taking on himself the whole blame. He voluntarily made himself
the scapegoat of an offence for which scores were charged, and
in particular he took on his own shoulders the heavy share of
responsibility which belonged to the negligent monks of
Westminster. Now as to the credibility of Pudlicott’s story, we
must admit that some of the juries accepted evidence that
corroborated some parts of it. Sworn men declared their belief
that the crypt was approached from the outside; that masons and
carpenters were employed on the business; that the churchyard
was closely guarded, and access refused, even to the butcher
who rented the grazing. It is clear too that the booty was got rid
of through the churchyard, and that piecemeal. There is evidence
even that hemp was sown, though the verdict of a jury cannot
alter the conditions of vegetable growth in an English winter. We
must allow too that it is pretty certain that Warfield had not the
custody of the keys of the crypt; though he was doubtless able to
give facilities for tampering with the door or forcing the lock. Yet
Pudlicott’s general story remains absolutely incredible. It was
surely impossible to break through the solid wall, and no
incuriousness or corruption would account for wall-piercing
operations being unnoticed, when carried on in the midst of a
considerable population for three months on end. Some of
Pudlicott’s lies were inconceivable in their crudity. Is it likely that
hemp, sown at Christmas-time, would, before the end of April,
afford sufficient green cover to hide the hole in the wall, and to
secrete gleaming articles of silver within its thick recesses? And
how are we to believe that there was a great gaping hole in the
wall of the crypt when nothing was heard of the crime for several
weeks after its perpetration, and no details of the king’s losses
were known until two months after the burglary, when the keeper
of the Wardrobe unlocked the door of the treasury and examined
its contents? A more artistic liar would have made his confession
more convincing.
What really happened seems to me to have been something
like this. I have no doubt that Pudlicott got into the treasury by
the simple process of his friend, Adam of Warfield, giving him
facilities for forcing the door or perhaps breaking a window. He
remained in the crypt a long time so that he might hand out its
contents to confederates who, as we learn from the depositions,
ate, drank, and revelled till midnight for two nights running in a
house within the precincts of the Fleet prison, and then went
armed and horsed to Westminster, returning towards daybreak
loaded with booty. But not only the revellers in Shenche’s
headquarters, but many monks, many abbey servants, the
custodians of the palace, the leading goldsmiths of the city, and
half the neighbours must have been cognisant of, if not
participating in, the crime. It speaks well for honour among
thieves, that it was not until deplorable indiscretions were made
in the disposal of the booty that any news of the misdeed
reached the ears of any of the official custodians of the treasure.
Suspicion of the crime was first excited by the discovery of
fragments of the spoil in all sorts of unexpected places. A
fisherman, plying his craft in the then silver Thames, netted a
silver goblet which had evidently been the property of the king.
Passers-by found cups, dishes, and similar precious things hidden
behind tombstones and other rough hiding-places in
St. Margaret’s Churchyard. Boys playing in the neighbouring fields
found pieces of plate concealed under hedgerows. Such
discoveries were made as far from Westminster as Kentish Town.
Moreover, many other people lighted upon similar pieces of
treasure trove. Foreign money found its way into the hands of the
money-changers at London, York, and Lymm, and other remote
parts. The city goldsmiths were the happy receivers of large
amounts of silver plate, among them, I regret to say, being
William Torel, the artist-goldsmith, whose skill in metal work has
left such an abiding mark in the decorations of the abbey church.
There were, too, scandalous stories whispered abroad. One of
them was that a woman of loose life explained her possession of
a precious ring by relating that it was given her by Dom Adam
the sacrist “so that she should become his friend”.

Such tales soon made the story of the robbery common

property. At last it came to the ears of the king and his ministers,
then encamped at Linlithgow for the Scottish war. Thereupon, on
6 June, the king appointed a special commission of judges to
investigate the matter. On 20 June, John Droxford, the keeper of
the wardrobe, came to Westminster with the keys of the crypt,
and then and only then did any official examination of the
treasury take place. An entry was made into the crypt and the
damage which had been done was inspected. The result is still to
be read in an inventory of the treasures lost and the treasures
found which Droxford drew up, and which may now be studied in
print.
It is pleasant to say that by the time Droxford went to work
much of the treasure, which had been scattered broadcast, was
being brought back and that more was soon to follow. The first
investigations as to where the treasure had been carried led to
fruitful results. A good deal of it was found hidden beneath the
beds of the keeper of the palace and of his assistant. Still more
was found in the lodgings of Richard Pudlicott and his mistress.
Adam the sacrist, and some of his brother monks and their
servants, were discovered to be in possession of other missing
articles. Altogether, when Droxford had finished his inventory, a
large proportion of the articles which had been lost were
reclaimed. Ultimately it seems that the losses were not very
severe.
Wholesale arrests were now made. Richard Pudlicott was
apprehended on 25 June, and William of the Palace soon
experienced the same fate. Before long the connexion which the
monks had had with the business seemed so well established
that the whole convent, including the abbot and forty-eight monks,
were indicted and sent to the Tower, where they were soon
joined by thirty-two other persons. This time the king’s net had
spread rather too widely, and the indiscriminate arrest of guilty
and innocent excited some measure of sympathy, even for the
guilty. The majority of the clerical prisoners were released on bail,
but some half-dozen laymen and ten monks were still kept in
custody. Both the released and the imprisoned culprits raised a
great outcry, sending petitions to the king demanding a further
enquiry into the whole matter.

The first commission meanwhile had been empanelling juries

and collecting evidence. But the matter was so serious that in
November a second royal commission was appointed to hear and
determine the matter. The members of this second commission
were chosen from among the most eminent of the king’s judges,
including the chief justice of the king’s bench, Sir Roger
Brabazon and the shrewdest judge of the time, William Bereford,
afterwards chief justice of common pleas.
I have already indicated in outline the result of the
investigations of the two judicial commissions. I have told you
how juries were empanelled from every hundred in the counties
of Middlesex and Surrey, and from the wards of the city of
London and from Westminster. The details of the evidence are
worthy of more special treatment than I can give them here,
because they afford a wonderful picture of the loose-living, easy-
going, slack, negligent, casual, and criminal doings of mediaeval
men and women. I must, however, be content to restate the
general result of the trials. Richard of Pudlicott was found guilty.
Various other people, including William of the Palace, and certain
monks, were declared accomplices, while Adam Warfield was
shrewdly suspected to be at the bottom of the whole business.
More than a year was spent in investigations, and it was not until
March, 1304, eleven months after the burglary, that William of the
Palace and five other lay culprits were comfortably hanged.
The great problem was how to deal with the clerical offenders
without adding to the king’s difficulties by rousing the sleeping
dogs of the church, always ready to bark when the state
meditated any infringement of the claim of all clerks to be subject
solely to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Accordingly Richard of
Pudlicott, and ten monks were reserved for further treatment.
Pudlicott, as we have seen, had been a tonsured person in his
youth, and he probably claimed, as did the monks, benefit of
clergy. It was probably now that Pudlicott nobly tried to shield his
monastic allies by his extraordinary confession. His heroism,
however, availed him nothing. But whatever his zeal for the
church, Edward I was upon adequate occasion ready to ride
rough-shod over clerical privileges, and he always bitterly
resented any attempt of a culprit, who had lived as a layman,
trying to shield himself on the pretext that he had been a clerk in
his youth. His corrupt chief justice, Thomas Weyland, had sought
to evade condemnation by resuming the tonsure and clerical garb
which he had worn before he abandoned his orders to become a
knight, a country squire, and the founder of a family of landed
gentry. But Weyland’s subdiaconate did not save him from exile
and loss of land and goods. Pudlicott’s sometime clerical
character had even less power to preserve him. He also paid
tardily the capital penalty for his misdeed. But it was surely his
clergy that kept him alive in prison for more than two years after
the date of the commission of his crime.
The Outrage at Westminster.
 The fate of the incriminated clerks still hung in the balance
when in the spring of 1305 Edward came back in triumph to
London, rejoicing that at last he had effected the thorough
conquest of Scotland. His cheerful frame of mind made him listen
readily to the demands of the monks of Westminster to have pity
on their unfortunate brethren, and to comply with the more
general clerical desire that ecclesiastical privilege should be
respected. Only a few months after the burglary, the news of the
outrage on pope Boniface VIII at Anagni had filled all
Christendom with horror. At the instance of Philip the Fair, king of
France, and his agents in Italy the pope was seized, maltreated,
and insulted. In the indignant words of Dante, “Christ was again
crucified in the person of his vicar”. The universal feeling of
resentment against so wanton a violation of ecclesiastical
privilege was ingeniously used in favour of the monks of
Westminster. Among the monks, arrested at first, but soon
released with the majority of their brethren, were two men who
had some reputation as historians. One of these was
magnanimous enough to write, two or three years afterwards, a
sort of funeral eulogy of Edward, but the other, Robert of
Reading, who, in my opinion, kept the official chronicle of the
abbey from 1302 to 1326, set forth the Westminster point of view
very effectively in the well-known version of the chronicle called
Flores Historiarum, the original manuscript of which is now in the
Chetham Library. In this is given what may be regarded as the
official account of Richard’s burglary. The robbery of the king of
England was a crime only comparable to the robbery of the
treasure of Boniface VIII, six months later at Anagni. The
chronicler is most indignant at the suggestion that the monks had
anything to do with the matter, and laments passionately their
long imprisonment and their unmerited sufferings. He relies in
substance on the story as told in Pudlicott’s confession. The
burglary was effected by a single robber.
 So lacking in humour was the Westminster annalist that he
did not scruple to borrow the phraseology and the copious
Scriptural citations of a certain “Passion of the monks of
Westminster according to John,” the whole text of which is
unfortunately not extant. I may say, however, that the species of
composition called a “Passion” was particularly in vogue at the
turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and is mainly
characterised by its extraordinary skill in parodying the words of
the Scripture in order to describe in mock heroic vein some
incident of more or less undeserved suffering. For profanity, grim
humour, and misapplied knowledge of the Vulgate the “passions”
of this period have no equal. They are a curious illustration of the
profane humour of the mediaeval ecclesiastic in his lighter
moments.
The Westminster annalist did not stand alone. Other monastic
chroniclers took up and accepted his story. It became the
accepted monastic doctrine that one robber only had stolen the
king’s treasure, and that therefore the monks of Westminster
were unwarrantably accused. One writer added to his text a
crude illustration of how, it was imagined, Pudlicott effected his
purpose. You may see opposite this page his rude pictorial
representation of the “one robber” kneeling on the grass in the
churchyard, and picking up by a hand and arm extended through
the broken window the precious stores within. But Pudlicott’s arm
must have been longer than the arm of justice to effect this
operation, and must have been twice or thrice the length of a tall
man. This same chronicler was not contented with repeating the
parallel now recognised between the sufferings of the monks of
Westminster, under their unjust accusations, and the passion of
pope Boniface, five months later, at the hands of the robbers
hired by the ruthless king of France. He must give a picture of
the Anagni outrage as well as of the orthodox version of the
Westminster burglary. How far he has succeeded, you may
gather from the rude sketch figured on the opposite page. Not
only does he give us so vivid a picture of pope Boniface’s
sufferings from the rude soldiery that the drawing might well be
used as a representation of a martyrdom, like that of St. Thomas
of Canterbury. His sketch of three other sacrilegious warriors,
rifling the huge chest that contained the papal treasures, skilfully
suggests that robbery was the common motive that united the
outrage at Anagni to the outrage at Westminster. He leaves us to
draw the deeper moral that the sinful desire of unhallowed
laymen to bring holy church and her ministers into discredit was
the ultimate root of both these scandals.

Edward was satisfied with his Scottish campaign; he was

becoming old and tired; he was pleased to know that a great
deal of the lost treasure had been recovered; and he was always
anxious to avoid scandal, and to minimise any disagreement with
the monks of his father’s foundation. He, therefore, condoned
what he could not remedy. He soon released all the monks from
prison. He even restored Shenche to his hereditary office of the
keepership of the palace. Richard of Pudlicott alone was offered
up to vengeance. In October, 1305, Richard was hanged,
regardless of his clergy.
The Outrage at Anagni.
 Affairs at the monastery of Westminster were not improved
after these events. There was much quarrelling among the
monks. Walter of Wenlock died. There were disputes as to his
succession; an unsatisfactory appointment was made, and there
was a considerable amount of strife for a generation. The feeling
against the king was shown equally against his son, and is
reflected in the bitter Westminster chronicle of the reign of
Edward II. One result of the demonstration of the futility of storing
valuables within the precincts of the abbey was that the chief
treasury of the wardrobe was bodily transferred to the Tower of
London.
Some obvious morals might be drawn from this slight but not
unpicturesque story; but I will forbear from printing them. One
generalisation I will, however, venture to make by way of
conclusion. The strongest impression left by the records of the
trial is one of the slackness and the easy-going ways of the
mediaeval man. The middle ages do not often receive fair
treatment. Some are, perhaps, too apt to idealise them, as an
age of heroic piety, with its statesmen, saints, heroes, artists, and
thinkers; but such people are in all ages the brilliant exceptions.
The age of St. Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Edward I, of
St. Louis of France, of St. Thomas Aquinas, the age in which the
greatest buildings of the world were made, was a great time and
had its great men. But the middle ages were a period of strange
contrasts. Shining virtues and gross vices stood side by side. The
contrasts between the clearly cut black and white of the thirteenth
century are attractive to us immersed in the continuous grey of
our own times. But we find our best analogies to mediaeval
conditions in those which are nowadays stigmatised as Oriental.
Conspicuous among them was a deep pervading shiftlessness
and casualness. Mediaeval man was never up to time. He
seldom kept his promise, not through malice, but because he
never did to-day what could be put off till to-morrow or the next
day.

Pudlicott then is a typical mediaeval criminal. He was

doubtless a scamp, but most of the people with whom he had
dealings were loose-thinking, easy-going folk like himself. Of
course there are always the exceptions. But Edward I, with his
gift of persistence, was a peculiarly exceptional type in the middle
ages, and even Edward I found it convenient to let things slide in
small matters. Thus on this occasion Edward began his
investigation with great show of care and determination to sift the
whole matter; but when he found that thorny problems were
being stirred up, he determined—not for the first time—to let
sleeping dogs lie, and avoid further scandal.
We must not, however, build up too large a superstructure of
theory on this petty story of the police courts, plus a mild
ecclesiastical scandal. Nor must we emphasize too much or
generalise too largely from the signs of slackness and negligence
shown in mediaeval trials. I become more and more averse to
facile generalisation about the middle ages or mediaeval man.
They may, moreover, be made in both directions. On the one
side we have the doctrine of our greatest of recent scholars,
bishop Stubbs, that the thirteenth century was the greatest
century of the middle ages, the flowering type of mediaeval
christianity and so on. But on the other hand there is the
contradictory generalisation of students, like my friend
Mr. Coulton, who surveys the time from St. Francis to Dante with
the conviction that the so-called great days of faith were the days
of unrestrained criminality and violence. Both these views can be
argued; but neither are really convincing. They seem to me to be
obtained by looking at one side of the question only. A more
fruitful doctrine is surely the view that ordinary mediaeval men
were not so very unlike ourselves, and that their virtues and
vices were not those of saints or ruffians, but were not wholly out
of relation to the ordinary humdrum virtues and vices that are
found to-day.

1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on 20 January, 1915.

Return to text
 NOTES.

I. Note on Authorities.

The accounts of the robbery of the king’s treasury in the

Chronicles are vitiated by the obvious desire of the writers, who
were mainly monks, to minimise the scandal to “religion” involved
in the suspected complicity of the Westminster monks. This is
seen even in the moderate account originating at St. Alban’s
Abbey, and contained in William Rishanger’s Chronicle (Rolls
Series), pp. 222 and 225, and also in the other St. Alban’s
version in Gesta Edwardi Primi, published in the same volume,
pp. 420–1. The bias is naturally at its worst in the Westminster
Abbey Chronicle, printed in Flores Historiarum, iii. 115, 117, 121,
and 131 (Rolls Series), which is more valuable perhaps as an
index of Westminster opinion than as a dispassionate statement
of the facts. The chief manuscript of this chronicle is preserved in
the Chetham Library, Manchester [MS. Chetham No. 6712]. It
was certainly written by a Westminster monk, and, perhaps after
1302, by Robert of Reading, who undoubtedly was the author of
the account of the reign of Edward II. If Robert wrote the story of
the robbery, it should be remembered that he was one of the
forty-nine monks indicted and sent to the Tower on a charge of
complicity in it. There are useful and more impartial notices in the
non-monastic Annales Londonienses in Stubbs’ Chronicles of
Edward I and Edward II, i. 130, 131, 132, and 134 (Rolls Series).
These date the robbery on 2 May.