Understanding Narratives through Dimensions of Analogy

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.