Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction

The vital role of analogical reasoning in human cognition allows us to grasp novel concepts by linking them with familiar ones through shared relational structures. Despite the attention previous research has given to word analogies, this work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook the structures that underpin these analogies, raising questions about the efficacy of word analogies as a measure of analogical reasoning skills akin to human cognition. In response to this, our paper introduces a task of analogical structure abduction, grounded in cognitive psychology, designed to abduce structures that form an analogy between two systems. In support of this task, we establish a benchmark called SCAR, containing 400 scientific analogies from 13 distinct fields, tailored for evaluating analogical reasoning with structure abduction. The empirical evidence underlines the continued challenges faced by LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in mastering this task, signifying the need for future exploration to enhance their abilities.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 (Findings

SEMIOTICS OF SIMILES IN ENGLISH POETIC TEXTS OF CANADIAN POETRY

The article reveals linguistic, cognitive and semiotic characteristics of simile in English poetic texts of Canadian poetry. Cognitive peculiarities of simile are defined via cognitive and semiotic operation of comparison and reconstruction of concepts and conceptual metaphors which underlie it. The cognitive operation of comparison is aimed at obtaining new knowledge as a result of matching homogeneous or heterogeneous comparable entities. Linguocognitive operations of analogical and narrative mapping are derived from the basic cognitive operation of comparison. Linguocognitive operations of attributive, relational, systems mapping are aimed at clarifying the basis of comparison, which establishes the similarity between subject and object of the simile. Semiotic peculiarities are clarified via identification of cultural codes and word-symbols which are represented in subjective and objective parts of similes. Thus, I view simile as a multifunctional linguistic and semiotic construal representing verbal patterns of form and semantic function. Linguistic and semiotic analysis of similes enables their classification into iconic, indexical and symbolic ones. The semiotic classification of similes is premised on the type of semiotic relation that exists between a “sign vehicle” and its meaning. Iconic similes are based on similarity between a sign and its referent, while indexical similes show relations of contiguity. Symbolic similes are differentiated on the basis of conventional pairing of a signified and a signifier within a simil

Analogical creative thinking and its application to engineering design and enterprise

Analogical thinking is valuable to creative design as it assists generation of new knowledge by mapping analogically from source domain to target domain. This study endeavours to enhance the value of analogical thinking in creative design by the development of Analogical Creative Process (ACP), and evaluation of its application in projects of engineering design and enterprise design. ACP is a systematic step-by-step tool to enable analogical thinking in design, and is derived from the fundamental cognitive process of key theories for analogy establishment. It analyses the given design problem as a complex of sub-systems and identifies their functions, before analogically mapping over the relations among the sub-systems between different domains. With these features, ACP is capable of providing tangible guidance on analogical thinking for designers without requirement of their existing experience in use of analogy. The effectiveness of ACP in creative ideation is examined with positive outcome observed in a real-life engineering design project compared to non-analogical approaches. The interrelations between creativity, analogy and design are identified featuring ACP and analogical thinking through a prescriptive study. As a result, a novel analogy-empowered creative design process is proposed and applied in an enterprise design project as a new field of application for analogical thinking in design. Initial evaluation supports the application success of the creative design process and analogical thinking is proven valuable in assisting enterprise design practices. The outcomes of this study include development of ACP based on the cognitive model of analogy, establishment of a new connection between creativity, analogy and design by the analogy-embedded creative design process, and a new design application of analogical thinking in enterprise. The identification of the value of analogical thinking in the context of enterprise design provides the researchers and entrepreneurs with a new tool to enhance enterprise design and business progress.Open Acces

Do large language models solve verbal analogies like children do?

Analogy-making lies at the heart of human cognition. Adults solve analogies such as \textit{Horse belongs to stable like chicken belongs to ...?} by mapping relations (\textit{kept in}) and answering \textit{chicken coop}. In contrast, children often use association, e.g., answering \textit{egg}. This paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) solve verbal analogies in A:B::C:? form using associations, similar to what children do. We use verbal analogies extracted from an online adaptive learning environment, where 14,002 7-12 year-olds from the Netherlands solved 622 analogies in Dutch. The six tested Dutch monolingual and multilingual LLMs performed around the same level as children, with MGPT performing worst, around the 7-year-old level, and XLM-V and GPT-3 the best, slightly above the 11-year-old level. However, when we control for associative processes this picture changes and each model's performance level drops 1-2 years. Further experiments demonstrate that associative processes often underlie correctly solved analogies. We conclude that the LLMs we tested indeed tend to solve verbal analogies by association with C like children do

Second language education context and home language effect: language dissimilarities and variation in immigrant students’ outcomes.

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as age and home language can be used in the teaching environment to predict and examine the development outcomes of SL students in verbal reasoning and vocabulary tasks. Hundred and six Portuguese participants, SL learners, between 8 and 17 years old, were assessed in vocabulary frequency, verbal analogies and morphological extraction tasks. In alphabetic languages (Romance languages), immigrant students (in a SL learning situation) with a strong linguistic distance (a home language with a very different orthographic foundation) are expected to struggle in language learning in spite of being aware of strategies that can improve their skills. The storage and combination of morphemes can be a demanding task for individual speakers at different levels. Cognitive mapping is strongly based on linguistic features of L1 development. Results show that home language, not age, was a significant predictor of variation in student’s outcomes. Speakers of alphasyllabary languages (Indo-Aryan languages as L1) were the poorest performers, the ‘linguistic distance’ of their languages explaining the performance’ result

What’s on: Cultural diversity and new educational approaches for specific school populations

Education policy regarding the immigrant school population is of upmost importance for current scientific research in social sciences. Digital resources and assessment instruments are challenges in education and psychology research, demanding knowledge from school community to address specific traits of learning and academic achievement. The education of future generation should be conceived based on multicultural idea of existing different cognitive profiles that have different selfregulations in learning environments as language acquisition development process. Immigrant school population is frequently neglected by school management and become emergent the development of open educational resources, validated tools and digital materials. Method: This post-doctoral research is focused in the development of open repository of paper and digital resources for school education, particularly addressing educational approaches for Portuguese second language learners. In current empirical study we are assessing a large sample of immigrant students from public schools, aged between 8 and 17 years old, learning Portuguese as second language, with heterogeneous profiles, in Lisbon district, from several levels of education. The main goal is to determine learner’s cognitive profiles in second language setting, and which common performances we can find between different home language speakers answering to 15 tests in the same circumstances. We believe that accurate evaluation tests can produce new changes in learning environments of linguistic minorities. Preliminary results will be discussed regarding three hypotheses about verbal behaviors in cognates, idiomatic utterances and verbal analogy tasks according to three variables: age, home language and exposure to second language. The variation of these predictors might have influence in cognitive and linguistic profiles. Additionally will be evaluated the reliability and difficulty of each task to provide a more psychometric sound measure than traditional other tools of assessment in national second language area. Findings will demonstrate new understanding about different speaking proficiency levels, rationales about predictive factors, and cutoffs to be considered as standards that will be adopted for the specific portuguese diagnostic test that is in validation process. Some of these new insights could be extended to the general investigation of proficiency and cognitive decoding skills in second language research, mainly for European languages context

Analogy Training Multilingual Encoders

Language encoders encode words and phrases in ways that capture their local semantic relatedness, but are known to be globally inconsistent. Global inconsistency can seemingly be corrected for, in part, by leveraging signals from knowledge bases, but previous results are partial and limited to monolingual English encoders. We extract a large-scale multilingual, multi-word analogy dataset from Wikidata for diagnosing and correcting for global inconsistencies and implement a four-way Siamese BERT architecture for grounding multilingual BERT (mBERT) in Wikidata through analogy training. We show that analogy training not only improves the global consistency of mBERT, as well as the isomorphism of language-specific subspaces, but also leads to significant gains on downstream tasks such as bilingual dictionary induction and sentence retrieval