Boosting Scientific Concepts Understanding: Can Analogy from Teacher Models Empower Student Models? (2024)

Abstract: Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. Previous research in the AI community has mainly focused on identifying and generating analogies and then examining their quality under human evaluation, which overlooks the practical application of these analogies in real-world settings. Inspired by the human education process, in this paper, we propose to investigate how analogies created by teacher language models (LMs) can assist student LMs in understanding scientific concepts, thereby aligning more closely with practical scenarios. Our results suggest that free-form analogies can indeed aid LMs in understanding concepts. Additionally, analogies generated by student LMs can improve their own performance on scientific question answering, demonstrating their capability to use analogies for self-learning new knowledge. Resources are available athttps://github.com/siyuyuan/SCUA.

## introduction analogy plays a crucial role in human cognition, facilitating the understanding of complex and unfamiliar concepts by relating them to familiar ones @xcite @xcite . for example, figure 1 illustrates how using the solar system as an analogy can enhance understanding of the complex structure of atoms. given its significant value across various fields, including creativity @xcite and education @xcite , the topic of analogy has been drawing significant research attention in the ai community. traditional research on analogy primarily focuses on evaluating @xcite @xcite and enhancing @xcite ## conclusion in this paper, we propose the scua task, which simulates the human education process to explore how analogies created by teacher lms can help student lms understand scientific concepts. our results suggest that free-form analogies indeed aid lms in comprehending concepts and enhance their ability to answer related scientific questions accurately. additionally, analogies generated by student lms can improve their own performance on scientific quizzes, demonstrating their capability to use analogies for self-learning new knowledge.