Creative Analogy

Creative analogy, the ability to identify and generate insightful mappings between disparate concepts, is a crucial aspect of human cognition currently being investigated through the lens of large language models (LLMs). Research focuses on understanding how LLMs perform analogical reasoning, comparing their strategies (e.g., association vs. relational mapping) to those of humans, and developing methods to evaluate and improve their ability to generate novel and helpful analogies across diverse domains. This work is significant because it sheds light on the underlying mechanisms of human creativity and offers potential for augmenting human problem-solving and creative processes through AI-assisted analogy generation, while also highlighting the challenges and potential risks associated with such applications.