TimeBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Temporal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models
Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Qianglong Chen, Weijiang Yu, Haotian Wang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
Abstract
Grasping the concept of time is a fundamental facet of human cognition, indispensable for truly comprehending the intricacies of the world.Previous studies typically focus on specific aspects of time, lacking a comprehensive temporal reasoning benchmark.To address this, we propose TimeBench, a comprehensive hierarchical temporal reasoning benchmark that covers a broad spectrum of temporal reasoning phenomena.TimeBench provides a thorough evaluation for investigating the temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models.We conduct extensive experiments on GPT-4, LLaMA2, and other popular LLMs under various settings.Our experimental results indicate a significant performance gap between the state-of-the-art LLMs and humans, highlighting that there is still a considerable distance to cover in temporal reasoning.Besides, LLMs exhibit capability discrepancies across different reasoning categories.Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze the impact of multiple aspects on temporal reasoning and emphasize the associated challenges.We aspire for TimeBench to serve as a comprehensive benchmark, fostering research in temporal reasoning.Code and data are available at https://github.com/zchuz/TimeBench.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.66
- 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:
- 1204–1228
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.66
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Qianglong Chen, Weijiang Yu, Haotian Wang, Ming Liu, and Bing Qin. 2024. TimeBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Temporal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1204–1228, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TimeBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Temporal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models (Chu et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.66.pdf