Inductive Linguistic Reasoning with Large Language Models

Raghav Ramji, Keshav Ramji


Abstract
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on their linguistic reasoning capabilities is an important task to understand the gaps in their skills that may surface during large-scale adoption. In this work, we investigate the abilities of such models to perform abstract multilingual reasoning through the lens of linguistic puzzles on extremely low-resource languages. As these translation tasks involve inductive and deductive reasoning from reference instances, we examine whether diverse auxiliary demonstrations can be automatically induced from seed exemplars, through analogical prompting. We employ a two-stage procedure, first generating analogical exemplars with a language model, and then applying them in-context along with provided target language exemplars. Our results on the modeLing dataset show that analogical prompting is effective in eliciting models’ knowledge of language grammar similarities, boosting the performance of GPT-4o by as much as 8.1% and Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct by 5.9% over chain-of-thought approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method generalizes to other tasks present in Linguistics Olympiad competitions, achieving state-of-the-art results across nearly all problem types and difficulty levels in the LINGOLY dataset.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1171
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
22783–22810
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1171/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raghav Ramji and Keshav Ramji. 2025. Inductive Linguistic Reasoning with Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 22783–22810, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inductive Linguistic Reasoning with Large Language Models (Ramji & Ramji, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1171.pdf