CoRE: Condition-based Reasoning for Identifying Outcome Variance in Complex Events

Sai P Vallurupalli, Francis Ferraro


Abstract
Knowing which latent conditions lead to a particular outcome is useful for critically examining claims made about complex event outcomes. Identifying implied conditions and examining their influence on an outcome is challenging. We handle this by combining and augmenting annotations from two existing datasets consisting of goals and states, and explore the influence of conditions through our research questions and Condition-based Reasoning tasks. We examine open and closed LLMs of varying sizes and intent-alignment on our reasoning tasks and find that conditions are useful when not all context is available. Models differ widely in their ability to generate and identify outcome-variant conditions, which affects their performance on outcome validation, when conditions are used to replace missing context. Larger models like GPT-4o, are more cautious in such less constrained situations.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.992
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:
19381–19401
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.992/
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Cite (ACL):
Sai P Vallurupalli and Francis Ferraro. 2025. CoRE: Condition-based Reasoning for Identifying Outcome Variance in Complex Events. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 19381–19401, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CoRE: Condition-based Reasoning for Identifying Outcome Variance in Complex Events (Vallurupalli & Ferraro, Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.992.pdf