Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning

Abstract

Syllogistic reasoning, a typical form of deductive reasoning, is a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. To better facilitate research on syllogistic reasoning, we develop a benchmark called SylloBase that differs from existing syllogistic datasets in three aspects: (1) Covering a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns; (2) Containing both automatically and manually constructed samples; and (3) Involving both the generation and understanding tasks. We automatically construct 50k template-based syllogism samples by mining syllogism patterns from Wikidata and ConceptNet. To improve our dataset’s naturalness and challenge, we apply GPT-3 to paraphrase the template-based data and further manually rewrite 1,000 samples as the test set. State-of-the-art pre-trained language models can achieve the best generation ROUGE-L of 38.72 by T5 and the best multi-choice accuracy of 72.77% by RoBERTa on SylloBase, which indicates the great challenge of learning diverse syllogistic reasoning types on SylloBase. Our datasets are released at https://github.com/casually-PYlearner/SYLLOBASE.