Logical Reasoning over Natural Language as Knowledge Representation: A Survey

Anonymous

Abstract: Logical reasoning is central to human cognition and intelligence. Past research of logical reasoning within AI uses formal language as knowledge representation and symbolic reasoners. However, reasoning with formal language has proved challenging~(e.g., brittleness and knowledge-acquisition bottleneck). This paper provides a comprehensive overview on a new paradigm of logical reasoning, which uses natural language as knowledge representation and pretrained language models as reasoners, including philosophical definition and categorization of logical reasoning, advantages of the new paradigm, benchmarks and methods, challenges of the new paradigm, possible future directions, and relation to related NLP fields. This new paradigm is promising since it not only alleviates many challenges of formal representation but also has advantages over end-to-end neural methods.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas

Contribution Types: Surveys

Languages Studied: English