Conceptual blending in EL++

The cognitive theory of conceptual blending models human creativity as a mental process that combines two mental spaces into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this theory, a blend is constructed by taking the commonalities among the input mental spaces into account, to form a so-called generic space, and by projecting their non-common structure in a selective way to the novel blended space. In this paper, we apply this idea to blend input spaces modeled as complex EL++ concepts. To construct the generic space of two EL++ concepts, these need to be generalised in a controlled manner. For this, we propose an upward refinement operator that is used for finding common generalisations of EL++ concepts.