Do Language Models Have a Common Sense regarding Time? Revisiting Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in the Era of Large Language Models

Raghav Jain, Daivik Sojitra, Arkadeep Acharya, Sriparna Saha, Adam Jatowt, Sandipan Dandapat


Abstract
Temporal reasoning represents a vital component of human communication and understanding, yet remains an underexplored area within the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs demonstrating significant proficiency in a range of tasks, a comprehensive, large-scale analysis of their temporal reasoning capabilities is missing. Our paper addresses this gap, presenting the first extensive benchmarking of LLMs on temporal reasoning tasks. We critically evaluate 8 different LLMs across 6 datasets using 3 distinct prompting strategies. Additionally, we broaden the scope of our evaluation by including in our analysis 2 Code Generation LMs. Beyond broad benchmarking of models and prompts, we also conduct a fine-grained investigation of performance across different categories of temporal tasks. We further analyze the LLMs on varying temporal aspects, offering insights into their proficiency in understanding and predicting the continuity, sequence, and progression of events over time. Our findings reveal a nuanced depiction of the capabilities and limitations of the models within temporal reasoning, offering a comprehensive reference for future research in this pivotal domain.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.418
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6750–6774
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.418
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.418
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raghav Jain, Daivik Sojitra, Arkadeep Acharya, Sriparna Saha, Adam Jatowt, and Sandipan Dandapat. 2023. Do Language Models Have a Common Sense regarding Time? Revisiting Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in the Era of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6750–6774, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Language Models Have a Common Sense regarding Time? Revisiting Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in the Era of Large Language Models (Jain et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.418.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.418.mp4