Brief

Researchers have developed a modular pipeline to improve the generation of educational analogies using large language models. This pipeline breaks down the process into four stages: source finding, sub-concept generation, explanation generation, and evaluation, drawing on Structure Mapping Theory. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and seven embedding models revealed that while sub-concepts enhance explanation quality and retrieval, they offer limited benefit in open-ended source generation. An LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method was also introduced, showing Claude Sonnet 4.6 aligns better with human rankings than absolute scores. AI