Improve Rule Retrieval and Reasoning with Self-Induction and Relevance ReEstimate

Ziyang Huang, Wangtao Sun, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu


Abstract
This paper systematically addresses the challenge of rule retrieval, a crucial yet underexplored area. Vanilla retrieval methods using sparse or dense retrievers to directly search for relevant rules to support downstream reasoning, often suffer from low accuracy. This is primarily due to a significant semantic gap between the instantiated facts in the queries and the abstract representations of the rules. Such misalignment results in suboptimal retrieval quality, which in turn negatively impacts reasoning performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose Self-Induction Augmented Retrieval (SIAR), a novel approach that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to induce potential inferential rules that might offer benefits for reasoning by abstracting the underlying knowledge and logical structure in queries. These induced rules are then used for query augmentation to improve retrieval effectiveness. Additionally, we introduce Rule Relevance ReEstimate (R3), a method that re-estimates the relevance of retrieved rules by assessing whether the abstract knowledge they contain can be instantiated to align with the facts in the queries and the helpfulness for reasoning. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed methods.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.286
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:
5473–5488
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.286/
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Cite (ACL):
Ziyang Huang, Wangtao Sun, Jun Zhao, and Kang Liu. 2025. Improve Rule Retrieval and Reasoning with Self-Induction and Relevance ReEstimate. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 5473–5488, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improve Rule Retrieval and Reasoning with Self-Induction and Relevance ReEstimate (Huang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.286.pdf