Exploring Reasoning Biases in Large Language Models Through Syllogism: Insights from the NeuBAROCO Dataset

Kentaro Ozeki, Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima, Mitsuhiro Okada


Abstract
This paper explores the question of how accurately current large language models can perform logical reasoning in natural language, with an emphasis on whether these models exhibit reasoning biases similar to humans. Specifically, our study focuses on syllogistic reasoning, a form of deductive reasoning extensively studied in cognitive science as a natural form of human reasoning. We present a syllogism dataset called NeuBAROCO, which consists of syllogistic reasoning problems in English and Japanese. This dataset was originally designed for psychological experiments to assess human reasoning capabilities using various forms of syllogisms. Our experiments with leading large language models indicate that these models exhibit reasoning biases similar to humans, along with other error tendencies. Notably, there is significant room for improvement in reasoning problems where the relationship between premises and hypotheses is neither entailment nor contradiction. We also present experimental results and in-depth analysis using a new Chain-of-Thought prompting method, which asks LLMs to translate syllogisms into abstract logical expressions and then explain their reasoning process. Our analysis using this method suggests that the primary limitations of LLMs lie in the reasoning process itself rather than the interpretation of syllogisms.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.950
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16063–16077
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.950
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.950
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kentaro Ozeki, Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima, and Mitsuhiro Okada. 2024. Exploring Reasoning Biases in Large Language Models Through Syllogism: Insights from the NeuBAROCO Dataset. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 16063–16077, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Reasoning Biases in Large Language Models Through Syllogism: Insights from the NeuBAROCO Dataset (Ozeki et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.950.pdf