Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation

Jinglong Gao, Xiao Ding, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Abstract
Causal reasoning ability is crucial for numerous NLP applications. Despite the impressive emerging ability of ChatGPT in various NLP tasks, it is unclear how well ChatGPT performs in causal reasoning. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of the ChatGPT’s causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments show that ChatGPT is not a good causal reasoner, but a good causal interpreter. Besides, ChatGPT has a serious hallucination on causal reasoning, possibly due to the reporting biases between causal and non-causal relationships in natural language, as well as ChatGPT’s upgrading processes, such as RLHF. The In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (COT) techniques can further exacerbate such causal hallucination. Additionally, the causal reasoning ability of ChatGPT is sensitive to the words used to express the causal concept in prompts, and close-ended prompts perform better than open-ended prompts. For events in sentences, ChatGPT excels at capturing explicit causality rather than implicit causality, and performs better in sentences with lower event density and smaller lexical distance between events.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.743
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11111–11126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.743
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.743
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinglong Gao, Xiao Ding, Bing Qin, and Ting Liu. 2023. Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11111–11126, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation (Gao et al., Findings 2023)
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