@inproceedings{mahendra-etal-2025-evaluating,
    title = "Evaluating Numeracy of Language Models as a Natural Language Inference Task",
    author = "Mahendra, Rahmad  and
      Spina, Damiano  and
      Cavedon, Lawrence  and
      Verspoor, Karin",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.467/",
    pages = "8336--8361",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7",
    abstract = "While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enhanced their capabilities to solve mathematical problems, other aspects of numeracy remain underexplored. In this paper, we propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of language models to perform basic numeracy tasks. We frame numeracy as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) task to assess the models' ability to understand both numbers and language contexts. We evaluate 49 language models (LMs), including fine-tuned LMs on NLI datasets, instruction-tuned LLMs, and specialized math-LLMs. Our findings reveal three main insights: (1) LLMs only clearly outperform smaller LMs in arithmetic tasks, indicating that mathematical reasoning cannot be generalized to other numeracy skills such as number comparison and normalization; (2) while most language models achieve fair to good accuracy for NLI entailment cases, they still struggle to predict contradiction and neutral cases; and (3) the robustness of language models' numeracy capabilities needs improvement, particularly in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of numbers in linguistic contexts."
}