Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction

Meiqi Chen, Yubo Ma, Kaitao Song, Yixin Cao, Yan Zhang, Dongsheng Li


Abstract
Event relations are crucial for narrative understanding and reasoning. Governed by nuanced logic, event relation extraction (ERE) is a challenging task that demands thorough semantic understanding and rigorous logical reasoning. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation to systematically explore the capability of LLMs in understanding and applying event relation logic. More in detail, we first investigate the deficiencies of LLMs in logical reasoning across different tasks. Our study reveals that LLMs are not logically consistent reasoners, which results in their suboptimal performance on tasks that need rigorous reasoning. To address this, we explore three different approaches to endow LLMs with event relation logic, and thus enable them to generate more coherent answers across various scenarios. Based on our approach, we also contribute a synthesized dataset (LLM-ERL) involving high-order reasoning for evaluation and fine-tuning. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on different tasks also validate the effectiveness of our approach and provide insights for solving practical tasks with LLMs in future work. Codes are available at https://github.com/chenmeiqii/Teach-LLM-LR.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.512
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9451–9478
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.512
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meiqi Chen, Yubo Ma, Kaitao Song, Yixin Cao, Yan Zhang, and Dongsheng Li. 2024. Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9451–9478, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction (Chen et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.512.pdf