Assessing the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in the context of Evidence-based Claim Verification

John Dougrez-Lewis, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Federico Ruggeri, Sebastian Löbbers, Yulan He, Maria Liakata


Abstract
Although LLMs have shown great performance on Mathematics and Coding related reasoning tasks, the reasoning capabilities of LLMs regarding other forms of reasoning are still an open problem. Here, we examine the issue of reasoning from the perspective of claim verification. We propose a framework designed to break down any claim paired with evidence into atomic reasoning types that are necessary for verification. We use this framework to create RECV, the first claim verification benchmark, incorporating real-world claims, to assess the deductive and abductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The benchmark comprises of three datasets, covering reasoning problems of in creasing complexity. We evaluate three state of-the-art proprietary LLMs under multiple prompt settings. Our results show that while LLMs can address deductive reasoning prob lems, they consistently fail in cases of abductive reasoning. Moreover, we observe that enhancing LLMs with rationale generation is not always beneficial. Nonetheless, we find that generated rationales are semantically similar to those provided by humans, especially in deduc tive reasoning cases.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1059
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
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
20604–20628
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1059/
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Cite (ACL):
John Dougrez-Lewis, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Federico Ruggeri, Sebastian Löbbers, Yulan He, and Maria Liakata. 2025. Assessing the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in the context of Evidence-based Claim Verification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 20604–20628, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in the context of Evidence-based Claim Verification (Dougrez-Lewis et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1059.pdf