ARN: A Comprehensive Framework and Benchmark for Analogical Reasoning on Narratives

Analogical reasoning is one of the prime abilities of humans and is linked to creativity and scientific discoveries. This ability has been studied extensively in natural language processing (NLP) and in cognitive psychology. NLP benchmarks often focus on proportional analogies, while the ones in cognitive psychology investigate longer pieces of text too. Yet, although studies that focus on analogical reasoning in an involved setting utilize narratives as their evaluation medium, analogical reasoning on narratives has not been studied extensively. We create an extensive evaluation framework for analogical reasoning on narratives that utilizes narrative elements to create lower-order and higher-order mappings that subsequently lead to the development of the Analogical Reasoning on Narratives (ARN) benchmark that covers four categories of far(cross-domain)/near(within-domain) analogies and far/near disanalogies, allowing us to study analogical reasoning in LLMs in distinct scenarios. Our results demonstrate that LLMs struggle to recognize higher-order mappings when they are not accompanied by lower-order mappings (far analogies) and show better performance when all mappings are formed simultaneously (near analogies). We observe that in all the scenarios, the analogical reasoning abilities of LLMs can be easily impaired by lower-order mappings in near disanalogies.