Can Pretrained Language Models (Yet) Reason Deductively?

Yuan, Z., Hu, S., Vulic, I., Korhonen, A. and Meng, Z. (2023) Can Pretrained Language Models (Yet) Reason Deductively? In: 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023), Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2-6 May 2023, pp. 1447-1462. (doi: 10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.106)

Abstract

Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models do possess a modicum of reasoning competence rather than merely memorising the knowledge. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the learnable deductive (also known as explicit) reasoning capability of PLMs. Through a series of controlled experiments, we posit two main findings. 1) PLMs inadequately generalise learned logic rules and perform inconsistently against simple adversarial surface form edits. 2) While the deductive reasoning fine-tuning of PLMs does improve their performance on reasoning over unseen knowledge facts, it results in catastrophically forgetting the previously learnt knowledge. Our main results suggest that PLMs cannot yet perform reliable deductive reasoning, demonstrating the importance of controlled examinations and probing of PLMs’ deductive reasoning abilities; we reach beyond (misleading) task performance, revealing that PLMs are still far from robust reasoning capabilities, even for simple deductive tasks.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Meng, Dr Zaiqiao
• Authors: Yuan, Z., Hu, S., Vulic, I., Korhonen, A., and Meng, Z.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

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