Is analogy enough to draw novel adjective-noun inferences?
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Abstract (arXiv)
Recent work (Ross et al., 2025, 2024) has argued that the ability of humans and LLMs respectively to generalize to novel adjective-noun combinations shows that they each have access to a compositional mechanism to determine the phrase's meaning and derive inferences. We study whether these inferences can instead be derived by analogy to known inferences, without need for composition. We investigate this by (1) building a model of analogical reasoning using similarity over lexical items, and (2) asking human participants to reason by analogy. While we find that this strategy works well for a large proportion of the dataset of Ross et al. (2025), there are novel combinations for which both humans and LLMs derive convergent inferences but which are not well handled by analogy. We thus conclude that the mechanism humans and LLMs use to generalize in these cases cannot be fully reduced to analogy, and likely involves composition.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 4 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.
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References · 4
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
- 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
- 2023Abstraction via exemplars? A representational case study on lexical category inference in BERTcited by 5
- 2024Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don't mimic the full human distributioncited by 4
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- 2024LLMs as Models for Analogical Reasoning
- 2024Using Counterfactual Tasks to Evaluate the Generality of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
- 2025Modelling Analogies and Analogical Reasoning: Connecting Cognitive Science Theory and NLP Research
- 2025The Curious Case of Analogies: Investigating Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
- 2023Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction
- 2024Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
- 2023Can language models learn analogical reasoning? Investigating training objectives and comparisons to human performance
- 2022Understanding Narratives through Dimensions of Analogy