@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2026-symbolicthought,
title = "{S}ymbolic{T}hought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding",
author = "Zhao, Runcong and
Zhu, Qinglin and
Xu, Hainiu and
Liang, Bin and
Gui, Lin and
He, Yulan",
editor = "Durrett, Greg and
Jian, Ping",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-demo.4/",
pages = "36--46",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-392-0",
abstract = "Understanding character relationships is essential for interpreting complex narratives and conducting socially grounded AI research. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and low in coverage, while large language models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or logically inconsistent outputs. We present SymbolicThought, a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning. The system constructs editable character relationship graphs, refines them using seven types of logical constraints, and enables real-time validation and conflict resolution through an interactive interface. To support logical supervision and explainable social analysis, we release a dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with corresponding logical structures. Experiments show that SymbolicThought improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost, offering a practical tool for narrative understanding, explainable AI, and LLM evaluation. The source code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/BLPXSPG/SymbolicThought)."
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<abstract>Understanding character relationships is essential for interpreting complex narratives and conducting socially grounded AI research. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and low in coverage, while large language models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or logically inconsistent outputs. We present SymbolicThought, a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning. The system constructs editable character relationship graphs, refines them using seven types of logical constraints, and enables real-time validation and conflict resolution through an interactive interface. To support logical supervision and explainable social analysis, we release a dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with corresponding logical structures. Experiments show that SymbolicThought improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost, offering a practical tool for narrative understanding, explainable AI, and LLM evaluation. The source code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/BLPXSPG/SymbolicThought).</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding
%A Zhao, Runcong
%A Zhu, Qinglin
%A Xu, Hainiu
%A Liang, Bin
%A Gui, Lin
%A He, Yulan
%Y Durrett, Greg
%Y Jian, Ping
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-392-0
%F zhao-etal-2026-symbolicthought
%X Understanding character relationships is essential for interpreting complex narratives and conducting socially grounded AI research. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and low in coverage, while large language models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or logically inconsistent outputs. We present SymbolicThought, a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning. The system constructs editable character relationship graphs, refines them using seven types of logical constraints, and enables real-time validation and conflict resolution through an interactive interface. To support logical supervision and explainable social analysis, we release a dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with corresponding logical structures. Experiments show that SymbolicThought improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost, offering a practical tool for narrative understanding, explainable AI, and LLM evaluation. The source code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/BLPXSPG/SymbolicThought).
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-demo.4/
%P 36-46
Markdown (Informal)
[SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-demo.4/) (Zhao et al., ACL 2026)
ACL