Fact-driven Logical Reasoning


Abstract in English

Logical reasoning, which is closely related to human cognition, is of vital importance in humans understanding of texts. Recent years have witnessed increasing attentions on machines logical reasoning abilities. However, previous studies commonly apply ad-hoc methods to model pre-defined relation patterns, such as linking named entities, which only considers global knowledge components that are related to commonsense, without local perception of complete facts or events. Such methodology is obviously insufficient to deal with complicated logical structures. Therefore, we argue that the natural logic units would be the group of backbone constituents of the sentence such as the subject-verb-object formed facts, covering both global and local knowledge pieces that are necessary as the basis for logical reasoning. Beyond building the ad-hoc graphs, we propose a more general and convenient fact-driven approach to construct a supergraph on top of our newly defined fact units, and enhance the supergraph with further explicit guidance of local question and option interactions. Experiments on two challenging logical reasoning benchmark datasets, ReClor and LogiQA, show that our proposed model, textsc{Focal Reasoner}, outperforms the baseline models dramatically. It can also be smoothly applied to other downstream tasks such as MuTual, a dialogue reasoning dataset, achieving competitive results.

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