In this paper, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks. Through an analysis of LLMs’ internal factual recall at each reasoning step via Knowledge Neurons, we reveal that LLMs fail to harness the critical factual associations under certain circumstances. Instead, they tend to opt for alternative, shortcut-like pathways to answer reasoning questions. By manually manipulating the recall process of parametric knowledge in LLMs, we demonstrate that enhancing this recall process directly improves reasoning performance whereas suppressing it leads to notable degradation. Furthermore, we assess the effect of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a powerful technique for addressing complex reasoning tasks. Our findings indicate that CoT can intensify the recall of factual knowledge by encouraging LLMs to engage in orderly and reliable reasoning. Furthermore, we explored how contextual conflicts affect the retrieval of facts during the reasoning process to gain a comprehensive understanding of the factual recall behaviors of LLMs. Code and data will be available soon.

Stance detection aims to identify the attitudes toward specific targets from text, which is an important research area in text mining and social media analytics. Existing research is mainly conducted in monolingual setting on English datasets. To tackle the data scarcity problem in low-resource languages, cross-lingual stance detection (CLSD) transfers the knowledge from high-resource (source) language to low-resource (target) language. The CLSD task is the most challenging in zero-shot setting when no training data is available in target language, and transferring stance-relevant knowledge learned from high-resource language to bridge the language gap is the key for improving the performance of zero-shot CLSD. In this paper, we leverage the capability of large language model (LLM) for stance knowledge acquisition, and propose KEAR, a knowledge elicitation and retrieval framework. The knowledge elicitation module in KEAR first derives different types of stance knowledge from LLM’s reasoning process. Then, the knowledge retrieval module in KEAR matches the target language input to the most relevant stance knowledge for enhancing text representations. Experiments on multilingual datasets show the effectiveness of KEAR compared with competitive baselines as well as the CLSD approaches trained with labeled data in target language.