When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives

Yebowen Hu, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Hassan Foroosh, Dong Yu, Fei Liu


Abstract
Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and compile key statistics to draw conclusions. We conduct comprehensive experiments with real NBA basketball data and present SportsGen, a new method to synthesize game narratives. By synthesizing data, we can rigorously evaluate LLMs’ reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. Our findings show that most models, including GPT-4o, often fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns. Open-source models like Llama-3 further suffer from significant score hallucinations. Finally, the effectiveness of reasoning is influenced by narrative complexity, information density, and domain-specific terms, highlighting the challenges in analytical reasoning tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.246
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4293–4308
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.246
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yebowen Hu, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Hassan Foroosh, Dong Yu, and Fei Liu. 2024. When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4293–4308, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives (Hu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.246.pdf