Thilini Wijesiriwardene

Making analogies is fundamental to cognition. Proportional analogies, which consist of four terms, are often used to assess linguistic and cognitive abilities. For instance, completing analogies like “Oxygen is to Gas as \is to \” requires identifying the semantic relationship (e.g., “type of”) between the first pair of terms (“Oxygen” and “Gas”) and finding a second pair that shares the same relationship (e.g., “Aluminum” and “Metal”). In this work, we introduce a 15K Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset for proportional analogy completion and evaluate the performance of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) in various knowledge-enhanced prompt settings. Specifically, we augment prompts with three types of knowledge: exemplar, structured, and targeted. Our results show that despite extensive training data, solving proportional analogies remains challenging for current LLMs, with the best model achieving an accuracy of 55%. Notably, we find that providing targeted knowledge can better assist models in completing proportional analogies compared to providing exemplars or collections of structured knowledge.

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs’ abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs’ abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs’ ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.

Over the past decade, analogies, in the form of word-level analogies, have played a significant role as an intrinsic measure of evaluating the quality of word embedding methods such as word2vec. Modern large language models (LLMs), however, are primarily evaluated on extrinsic measures based on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE, and there are only a few investigations on whether LLMs can draw analogies between long texts. In this paper, we present ANALOGICAL, a new benchmark to intrinsically evaluate LLMs across a taxonomy of analogies of long text with six levels of complexity – (i) word, (ii) word vs. sentence, (iii) syntactic, (iv) negation, (v) entailment, and (vi) metaphor. Using thirteen datasets and three different distance measures, we evaluate the abilities of eight LLMs in identifying analogical pairs in the semantic vector space. Our evaluation finds that it is increasingly challenging for LLMs to identify analogies when going up the analogy taxonomy.

Internet Memes (IMs) are creative media that combine text and vision modalities that people use to describe their situation by reusing an existing, familiar situation. Prior work on IMs has focused on analyzing their spread over time or high-level classification tasks like hate speech detection, while a principled analysis of their stratified semantics is missing. Hypothesizing that Semantic Web technologies are appropriate to help us bridge this gap, we build the first Internet Meme Knowledge Graph (IMKG): an explicit representation with 2 million edges that capture the semantics encoded in the text, vision, and metadata of thousands of media frames and their adaptations as memes. IMKG is designed to fulfil seven requirements derived from the inherent characteristics of IMs. IMKG is based on a comprehensive semantic model, it is populated with data from representative IM sources, and enriched with entities extracted from text and vision connected through background knowledge from Wikidata. IMKG integrates its knowledge both in RDF and as a labelled property graph. We provide insights into the structure of IMKG, analyze its central concepts, and measure the effect of knowledge enrichment from different information modalities. We demonstrate its ability to support novel use cases, like querying for IMs that are based on films, and we provide insights into the signal captured by the structure and the content of its nodes. As a novel publicly available resource, IMKG opens the possibility for further work to study the semantics of IMs, develop novel reasoning tasks, and improve its quality.