Divide and Translate: Compositional First-Order Logic Translation and Verification for Complex Logical Reasoning

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 11 Feb 2025ICLR 2025 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Logical Reasoning, Large Language Models, Neurosymbolic Approaches, Semantic Decomposition, Formal Language Verification
TL;DR: We introduce CLOVER, a neurosymbolic approach that enhances complex logical reasoning in large language models by compositional translation of natural language into first-order logic and verification of logical semantics.
Abstract: Complex logical reasoning tasks require a long sequence of reasoning, which a large language model (LLM) with chain-of-thought prompting still falls short. To alleviate this issue, neurosymbolic approaches incorporate a symbolic solver. Specifically, an LLM only translates a natural language problem into a satisfiability (SAT) problem that consists of first-order logic formulas, and a sound symbolic solver returns a mathematically correct solution. However, we discover that LLMs have difficulties to capture complex logical semantics hidden in the natural language during translation. To resolve this limitation, we propose a Compositional First-Order Logic Translation. An LLM first parses a natural language sentence into newly defined logical dependency structures that consist of an atomic subsentence and its dependents, then sequentially translate the parsed subsentences. Since multiple logical dependency structures and sequential translations are possible for a single sentence, we also introduce two Verification algorithms to ensure more reliable results. We utilize an SAT solver to rigorously compare semantics of generated first-order logic formulas and select the most probable one. We evaluate the proposed method, dubbed CLOVER, on seven logical reasoning benchmarks and show that it outperforms the previous neurosymbolic approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Primary Area: neurosymbolic & hybrid AI systems (physics-informed, logic & formal reasoning, etc.)
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Submission Number: 9134
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