AnaScore: Understanding Semantic Parallelism in Proportional Analogies

Liyan Wang, Haotong Wang, Yves Lepage


Abstract
Formulaic criteria for proportional analogies, which capture relational mappings between two ratios of terms, are mainly confined to the formal level. As analogy datasets grow more complex, especially in evaluating the cognitive abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), assessing parallelism in them becomes increasingly challenging and often requires human annotation. In this work, we propose AnaScore, an automatic metric for evaluating the strength of semantic parallelism in sentence analogies. AnaScore systematically provides formalized explanations for shared relational patterns at the level of conceptual knowledge. We apply AnaScore to annotate several existing datasets, considering different directions of the relations, and uncover artifacts in data construction. Our experiments with various LLMs demonstrate the efficacy of the AnaScore metric in capturing the inherent quality of analogical relationships, showing a positive correlation between analogy quality and model performance. Thanks to this metric, we clearly demonstrate that formally explainable examples are more beneficial for analogical reasoning, while ambiguous analogies with no clear criterion tend to hinder inference.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1175–1188
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.54/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liyan Wang, Haotong Wang, and Yves Lepage. 2025. AnaScore: Understanding Semantic Parallelism in Proportional Analogies. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1175–1188, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AnaScore: Understanding Semantic Parallelism in Proportional Analogies (Wang et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.54.pdf