@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-odl,
title = "{ODL}-{T}emp{LLM}: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with {LLM}s",
author = "Liu, Jinshuo and
Bi, Cheng and
Wang, Meng and
Deng, Juan and
Ji, Donghong and
Pan, Jeff Z.",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.873/",
pages = "19113--19126",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. Recent approaches rely on the LLM to infer temporal relations between events and largely overlook the inherent structural nature of temporal relationships. In this work, we propose ODL-TempLLM (Ontology-Guided and Description Logic{--}Constrained Temporal Reasoning with LLMs), a novel paradigm for temporal reasoning with LLMs that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. ODL-TempLLM leverages ontology learning to explicitly construct structured temporal knowledge, employs a symbolic reasoner to deductively reason about temporal relations and uses logic-constrained retrieval augmentation to obtain relevant facts.Experiments results evaluated across there datasets via various LLM backbones show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07{--}31.83 F1 points and 1.00{--}30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="liu-etal-2026-odl">
<titleInfo>
<title>ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jinshuo</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Cheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bi</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Meng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Juan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Deng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Donghong</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ji</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jeff</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Z</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. Recent approaches rely on the LLM to infer temporal relations between events and largely overlook the inherent structural nature of temporal relationships. In this work, we propose ODL-TempLLM (Ontology-Guided and Description Logic–Constrained Temporal Reasoning with LLMs), a novel paradigm for temporal reasoning with LLMs that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. ODL-TempLLM leverages ontology learning to explicitly construct structured temporal knowledge, employs a symbolic reasoner to deductively reason about temporal relations and uses logic-constrained retrieval augmentation to obtain relevant facts.Experiments results evaluated across there datasets via various LLM backbones show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07–31.83 F1 points and 1.00–30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">liu-etal-2026-odl</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.873/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>19113</start>
<end>19126</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs
%A Liu, Jinshuo
%A Bi, Cheng
%A Wang, Meng
%A Deng, Juan
%A Ji, Donghong
%A Pan, Jeff Z.
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F liu-etal-2026-odl
%X Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. Recent approaches rely on the LLM to infer temporal relations between events and largely overlook the inherent structural nature of temporal relationships. In this work, we propose ODL-TempLLM (Ontology-Guided and Description Logic–Constrained Temporal Reasoning with LLMs), a novel paradigm for temporal reasoning with LLMs that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. ODL-TempLLM leverages ontology learning to explicitly construct structured temporal knowledge, employs a symbolic reasoner to deductively reason about temporal relations and uses logic-constrained retrieval augmentation to obtain relevant facts.Experiments results evaluated across there datasets via various LLM backbones show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07–31.83 F1 points and 1.00–30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.873/
%P 19113-19126
Markdown (Informal)
[ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.873/) (Liu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL