ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases

Quyet V. Do, Tianqing Fang, Shizhe Diao, Zhaowei Wang, Yangqiu Song


Abstract
Reasoning over Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKB), i.e. CSKB reasoning, has been explored as a way to acquire new commonsense knowledge based on reference knowledge in the original CSKBs and external prior knowledge.Despite the advancement of Large Language Models (LLM) and prompt engineering techniques in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle to deal with CSKB reasoning.One of the problems is that it is hard for them to acquire explicit relational constraints in CSKBs from only in-context exemplars, due to a lack of symbolic reasoning capabilities (CITATION).To this end, we proposed **ConstraintChecker**, a plugin over prompting techniques to provide and check explicit constraints.When considering a new knowledge instance, ConstraintChecker employs a rule-based module to produce a list of constraints, then it uses a zero-shot learning module to check whether this knowledge instance satisfies all constraints.The acquired constraint-checking result is then aggregated with the output of the main prompting technique to produce the final output.Experimental results on CSKB Reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by bringing consistent improvements over all prompting methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
714–731
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.42
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Quyet V. Do, Tianqing Fang, Shizhe Diao, Zhaowei Wang, and Yangqiu Song. 2024. ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 714–731, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases (Do et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.42.pdf
Software:
 2024.eacl-long.42.software.zip