Scaling Synthetic Logical Reasoning Datasets with Context-Sensitive Declarative Grammars

Damien Sileo


Abstract
Logical reasoning remains a challenge for natural language processing, but it can be improved by training language models to mimic theorem provers on procedurally generated problems. Previous work used domain-specific proof generation algorithms, which biases reasoning toward specific proof traces and limits auditability and extensibility. We present a simpler and more general declarative framework with flexible context-sensitive rules binding multiple languages (specifically, simplified English and the TPTP theorem-proving language). We construct first-order logic problems by selecting up to 32 premises and one hypothesis. We demonstrate that using semantic constraints during generation and careful English verbalization of predicates enhances logical reasoning without hurting natural English tasks. Using relatively small DeBERTa-v3 models, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the FOLIO human-authored logic dataset, surpassing GPT-4 in accuracy with or without an external solver by 12%.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.301
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:
5275–5283
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.301
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.301
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Damien Sileo. 2024. Scaling Synthetic Logical Reasoning Datasets with Context-Sensitive Declarative Grammars. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5275–5283, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scaling Synthetic Logical Reasoning Datasets with Context-Sensitive Declarative Grammars (Sileo, EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.301.pdf
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