Categorical Syllogisms Revisited: A Review of the Logical Reasoning Abilities of LLMs for Analyzing Categorical Syllogisms

Shi Zong, Jimmy Lin


Abstract
There has been a huge number of benchmarks proposed to evaluate how large language models (LLMs) behave for logic inference tasks. However, it remains an open question how to properly evaluate this ability. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview of prior works on the logical reasoning ability of LLMs for analyzing categorical syllogisms. We first investigate all the possible variations for categorical syllogisms from a purely logical perspective and then examine the underlying configurations (i.e., mood and figure) tested by existing datasets. Our results indicate that compared to template-based synthetic datasets, crowdsourcing approaches normally sacrifice the coverage of configurations (i.e., mood and figure) of categorical syllogisms for more language variations, thus bringing challenges to fully testing LLMs under different situations. We then summarize the findings and observations for the performance of LLMs to infer the validity of syllogisms from the current literature. The error rate breakdown analyses suggest that the interpretation of quantifiers seems to be the current bottleneck that limits the performance of the LLMs and is thus worth more attention. Finally, we discuss several points that might be worth considering when researchers plan to release categorical syllogism datasets. We hope our work will provide a timely review of the current literature regarding categorical syllogisms, and motivate more interdisciplinary research between communities, specifically computational linguists and logicians.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4science-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Science (NLP4Science)
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Lotem Peled-Cohen, Nitay Calderon, Shir Lissak, Roi Reichart
Venue:
NLP4Science
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
230–239
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4science-1.20
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Shi Zong and Jimmy Lin. 2024. Categorical Syllogisms Revisited: A Review of the Logical Reasoning Abilities of LLMs for Analyzing Categorical Syllogisms. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Science (NLP4Science), pages 230–239, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Categorical Syllogisms Revisited: A Review of the Logical Reasoning Abilities of LLMs for Analyzing Categorical Syllogisms (Zong & Lin, NLP4Science 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4science-1.20.pdf