# Understanding Narratives through Dimensions of Analogy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [BERT is to NLP what AlexNet is to CV: Can Pre-Trained Language Models Identify Analogies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04949/) (2021)
- [Frame-Semantic Parsing with Softmax-Margin Segmental RNNs and a Syntactic Scaffold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09528/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Base Question Answering by Case-based Reasoning over Subgraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10610/) (2022)
- [Extracting Qualitative Causal Structure with Transformer-Based NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13304/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12874/) (2023)
- [ARN: Analogical Reasoning on Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00996/) (2023)
- [Creativity in AI: Progresses and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17218/) (2024)
- [Modelling Analogies and Analogical Reasoning: Connecting Cognitive Science Theory and NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09381/) (2025)
- [Transferring Procedural Knowledge across Commonsense Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13867/) (2023)
- [Does Wikidata Support Analogical Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00620/) (2022)
- [Analogical Structure, Minimal Contextual Cues and Contrastive Distractors: Input Design for Sample-Efficient Linguistic Rule Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10441/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analogical reasoning is a powerful qualitative reasoning tool that enables humans to connect two situations, and to generalize their knowledge from familiar to novel situations. Cognitive Science research provides valuable insights into the richness and complexity of analogical reasoning, together with implementations of expressive analogical reasoners with limited scalability. Modern scalable AI techniques with the potential to reason by analogy have been only applied to the special case of proportional analogy, and not to understanding higher-order analogies. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap by: 1) formalizing six dimensions of analogy based on mature insights from Cognitive Science research, 2) annotating a corpus of fables with each of these dimensions, and 3) defining four tasks with increasing complexity that enable scalable evaluation of AI techniques. Experiments with language models and neuro-symbolic AI reasoners on these tasks reveal that state-of-the-art methods can be applied to reason by analogy with a limited success, motivating the need for further research towards comprehensive and scalable analogical reasoning by AI. We make all our code and data available.