AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies

Xiao Ye, Andrew Wang, Jacob Choi, Yining Lu, Shreya Sharma, Lingfeng Shen, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Nicholas Andrews, Daniel Khashabi


Abstract
Humans regularly engage in analogical thinking, relating personal experiences to current situations (X is analogous to Y because of Z). Analogical thinking allows humans to solve problems in creative ways, grasp difficult concepts, and articulate ideas more effectively. Can language models (LMs) do the same? To answer this question, we propose AnaloBench, a benchmark to determine analogical reasoning ability in LMs. Our benchmarking approach focuses on aspects of this ability that are common among humans: (i) recalling related experiences from a large amount of information, and (ii) applying analogical reasoning to complex and lengthy scenarios. We collect a set of 340 high quality, human written analogies for use in our benchmark, which constitutes the largest such collection to date. We then test a broad collection of models consisting of 12 open source and 3 proprietary in various sizes and architectures. As in prior results, scaling up LMs results in some performance boosts. Surprisingly, scale offers minimal gains when, (i) analogies involve lengthy scenarios, or (ii) recalling relevant scenarios from a large pool of information, a process analogous to finding a needle in a haystack. We hope these observations encourage further research in this field.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.725
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
13060–13082
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.725
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiao Ye, Andrew Wang, Jacob Choi, Yining Lu, Shreya Sharma, Lingfeng Shen, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Nicholas Andrews, and Daniel Khashabi. 2024. AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13060–13082, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies (Ye et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.725.pdf