Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning

Siheng Xiong, Ali Payani, Ramana Kompella, Faramarz Fekri


Abstract
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they are not without their flaws and inaccuracies. Recent studies have introduced various methods to mitigate these limitations. Temporal reasoning (TR), in particular, presents a significant challenge for LLMs due to its reliance on diverse temporal concepts and intricate temporal logic. In this paper, we propose TG-LLM, a novel framework towards language-based TR. Instead of reasoning over the original context, we adopt a latent representation, temporal graph (TG) that enhances the learning of TR. A synthetic dataset (TGQA), which is fully controllable and requires minimal supervision, is constructed for fine-tuning LLMs on this text-to-TG translation task. We confirmed in experiments that the capability of TG translation learned on our dataset can be transferred to other TR tasks and benchmarks. On top of that, we teach LLM to perform deliberate reasoning over the TGs via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) bootstrapping and graph data augmentation. We observed that those strategies, which maintain a balance between usefulness and diversity, bring more reliable CoTs and final results than the vanilla CoT distillation.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.563
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10452–10470
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.563
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siheng Xiong, Ali Payani, Ramana Kompella, and Faramarz Fekri. 2024. Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10452–10470, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning (Xiong et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.563.pdf