ChatGPT Is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models
Ning Bian, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Ben He, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in NLP. However, their ability to memorize, represent, and leverage commonsense knowledge has been a well-known pain point. In this paper, we specifically focus on ChatGPT, a widely used and easily accessible LLM, and ask the following questions: (1) Can ChatGPT effectively answer commonsense questions? (2) Is ChatGPT aware of the underlying commonsense knowledge for answering a specific question? (3) Is ChatGPT knowledgeable in commonsense? (4) Can ChatGPT effectively leverage commonsense for answering questions? We conduct a series of experiments on 11 datasets to evaluate ChatGPT’s commonsense abilities, including answering commonsense questions, identifying necessary knowledge, generating knowledge descriptions, and using knowledge descriptions to answer questions again. Experimental results show that: (1) ChatGPT can achieve good QA accuracies in commonsense tasks, while still struggling with certain domains of datasets. (2) ChatGPT is knowledgeable, and can accurately generate most of the commonsense knowledge using knowledge prompts. (3) Despite its knowledge, ChatGPT is an inexperienced commonsense problem solver, which cannot precisely identify the needed commonsense for answering a specific question. These findings raise the need to explore improved mechanisms for effectively incorporating commonsense into LLMs like ChatGPT, such as better instruction following and commonsense guidance.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.276
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3098–3110
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.276
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ning Bian, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Ben He, Shanshan Jiang, and Bin Dong. 2024. ChatGPT Is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3098–3110, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- ChatGPT Is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models (Bian et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.276.pdf