@inproceedings{leidinger-etal-2024-llms,
    title = "Are {LLM}s classical or nonmonotonic reasoners? Lessons from generics",
    author = "Leidinger, Alina  and
      Van Rooij, Robert  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.acl-short.51/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-short.51",
    pages = "558--573",
    abstract = "Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human critique. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as {\textquoteleft}Birds fly', and exceptions, {\textquoteleft}Penguins don`t fly' (see Fig. 1). While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ({\textquoteleft}Owls fly') or unrelated information ({\textquoteleft}Lions have manes').Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs as long as consistent reasoning remains elusive."
}