{"title":"Natural Language Reasoning, A Survey","authors":"Fei Yu, Hongbo Zhang, Prayag Tiwari, Benyou Wang","doi":"10.1145/3664194","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic research and mathematical reasoning.</p>","PeriodicalId":50926,"journal":{"name":"ACM Computing Surveys","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":23.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACM Computing Surveys","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3664194","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, THEORY & METHODS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic research and mathematical reasoning.
期刊介绍:
ACM Computing Surveys is an academic journal that focuses on publishing surveys and tutorials on various areas of computing research and practice. The journal aims to provide comprehensive and easily understandable articles that guide readers through the literature and help them understand topics outside their specialties. In terms of impact, CSUR has a high reputation with a 2022 Impact Factor of 16.6. It is ranked 3rd out of 111 journals in the field of Computer Science Theory & Methods.
ACM Computing Surveys is indexed and abstracted in various services, including AI2 Semantic Scholar, Baidu, Clarivate/ISI: JCR, CNKI, DeepDyve, DTU, EBSCO: EDS/HOST, and IET Inspec, among others.