Evaluating the Rationale Understanding of Critical Reasoning in Logical Reading Comprehension

Akira Kawabata, Saku Sugawara


Abstract
To precisely evaluate a language model’s capability for logical reading comprehension, we present a dataset for testing the understanding of the rationale behind critical reasoning. For questions taken from an existing multiple-choice logical reading comprehension dataset, we crowdsource rationale texts that explain why we should select or eliminate answer options, resulting in 3,003 multiple-choice subquestions that are associated with 943 main questions. Experiments on our dataset show that recent large language models (e.g., InstructGPT) struggle to answer the subquestions even if they are able to answer the main questions correctly. We find that the models perform particularly poorly in answering subquestions written for the incorrect options of the main questions, implying that the models have a limited capability for explaining why incorrect alternatives should be eliminated. These results suggest that our dataset encourages further investigation into the critical reasoning ability of language models while focusing on the elimination process of relevant alternatives.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.9
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:
116–143
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Akira Kawabata and Saku Sugawara. 2023. Evaluating the Rationale Understanding of Critical Reasoning in Logical Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 116–143, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating the Rationale Understanding of Critical Reasoning in Logical Reading Comprehension (Kawabata & Sugawara, EMNLP 2023)
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https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.9.pdf
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