Analogy Acronym Madness

Every field has its acronyms, but computer scientists and computational modelers seem to be so enamored with acronyms that the names of the models often seemed designed to fit a clever acronym rather than to be descriptive of what they do. As I was working today, I began to think about all of the acronyms for models of one particular thing, analogy. I came up with a dozen off the top of my head, and a quick perusal of some of the papers on my computer gave me even more. Here are the ones I could come up with:

PHINEAS
LISA
CARL
SEQL
MAC/FAC
SME (and I-SME)
MAGI
JUXTA
CAB
ARCS
AMBR (and AMBR-2)
DUAL
COPYCAT
TABLETOP
MetaCat
STAR-1 and STAR-2
ACME
ARCS
IAM
CARL
and the cleverest of all ANALOGY

Try and guess what they all stand for (a hint: "A" almost always stands for "Analogy"). If you're really curious, I'll tell you, though, I can't for the life of me remember what PHINEAS is an acronym for.

By the way, the coolest model of analogy, and the funniest, is the parallelogram model of analogy, which doesn't (as far as I know) have an acronym. You can read about it in Rumelhart, D. E. & Abrahamson, A. A. (1973). A model for analogical reasoning. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 1-28.


From Figure 1 of Oberauer, K et al. The multiple faces of working memory: storage, processing, supervision, and coordination.