We describe a translation from a fragment of SUMO (SUMO-K) into higher-order set theory. The translation provides a formal semantics for portions of SUMO which are beyond first-order and which have previously only had an informal interpretation. It also for the first time embeds a large common-sense ontology into a very secure interactive theorem proving system. We further extend our previous work in finding contradictions in SUMO from first order constructs to include a portion of SUMO's higher order constructs. Finally, using the translation, we can create problems that can be proven using higher-order interactive and automated theorem provers. This is tested in several systems and can be used to form a corpus of higher-order common-sense reasoning problems.

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.

Commonsense question answering (QA) research requires machines to answer questions based on commonsense knowledge. However, this research requires expensive labor costs to annotate data as the basis of research, and models that rely on fine-tuning paradigms only apply to specific tasks, rather than learn a general commonsense reasoning ability. As a more robust method, zero-shot commonsense question answering shows a good prospect. The current zero-shot framework tries to convert triples in commonsense knowledge graphs (KGs) into QA-form samples as the pre-trained data source to incorporate commonsense knowledge into the model. However, this method ignores the multi-hop relationship in the KG, which is also an important central problem in commonsense reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-hop commonsense knowledge injection framework. Specifically, it explores multi-hop reasoning paradigm in KGs that conform to linguistic logic, and we further propose two multi-hop QA generation methods based on KGs. Then, we utilize contrastive learning to pre-train the model with the synthetic QA dataset to inject multi-hop commonsense knowledge. Extensive experiments on five commonsense question answering benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-art performance.

Commonsense reasoning, aiming at endowing machines with a human-like ability to make situational presumptions, is extremely challenging to generalize. For someone who barely knows about "meditation," while is knowledgeable about "singing," he can still infer that "meditation makes people relaxed" from the existing knowledge that "singing makes people relaxed" by first conceptualizing "singing" as a "relaxing event" and then instantiating that event to "meditation." This process, known as conceptual induction and deduction, is fundamental to commonsense reasoning while lacking both labeled data and methodologies to enhance commonsense modeling. To fill such a research gap, we propose CAT (Contextualized ConceptuAlization and InsTantiation), a semi-supervised learning framework that integrates event conceptualization and instantiation to conceptualize commonsense knowledge bases at scale. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performances on two conceptualization tasks, and the acquired abstract commonsense knowledge can significantly improve commonsense inference modeling. Our code, data, and fine-tuned models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAT.

Structured knowledge is important for many AI applications. Commonsense knowledge, which is crucial for robust human-centric AI, is covered by a small number of structured knowledge projects. However, they lack knowledge about human traits and behaviors conditioned on socio-cultural contexts, which is crucial for situative AI. This paper presents CANDLE, an end-to-end methodology for extracting high-quality cultural commonsense knowledge (CCSK) at scale. CANDLE extracts CCSK assertions from a huge web corpus and organizes them into coherent clusters, for 3 domains of subjects (geography, religion, occupation) and several cultural facets (food, drinks, clothing, traditions, rituals, behaviors). CANDLE includes judicious techniques for classification-based filtering and scoring of interestingness. Experimental evaluations show the superiority of the CANDLE CCSK collection over prior works, and an extrinsic use case demonstrates the benefits of CCSK for the GPT-3 language model. Code and data can be accessed at https://candle.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.

Recent work has shown that prompting language models with code-like representations of natural language leads to performance improvements on structured reasoning tasks. However, such tasks comprise only a small subset of all natural language tasks. In our work, we seek to answer whether or not code-prompting is the preferred way of interacting with language models in general. We compare code and text prompts across three popular GPT models (davinci, code-davinci-002, and text-davinci-002) on a broader selection of tasks (e.g., QA, sentiment, summarization) and find that with few exceptions, code prompts do not consistently outperform text prompts. Furthermore, we show that the style of code prompt has a large effect on performance for some but not all tasks and that fine-tuning on text instructions leads to better relative performance of code prompts.

Language models have become very popular recently and many claims have been made about their abilities, including for commonsense reasoning. Given the increasingly better results of current language models on previous static benchmarks for commonsense reasoning, we explore an alternative dialectical evaluation. The goal of this kind of evaluation is not to obtain an aggregate performance value but to find failures and map the boundaries of the system. Dialoguing with the system gives the opportunity to check for consistency and get more reassurance of these boundaries beyond anecdotal evidence. In this paper we conduct some qualitative investigations of this kind of evaluation for the particular case of spatial reasoning (which is a fundamental aspect of commonsense reasoning). We conclude with some suggestions for future work both to improve the capabilities of language models and to systematise this kind of dialectical evaluation.

Vision (image and video) - Language (VL) pre-training is the recent popular paradigm that achieved state-of-the-art results on multi-modal tasks like image-retrieval, video-retrieval, visual question answering etc. These models are trained in an unsupervised way and greatly benefit from the complementary modality supervision. In this paper, we explore if the language representations trained using vision supervision perform better than vanilla language representations on Natural Language Understanding and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. We experiment with a diverse set of image-text models such as ALBEF, BLIP, METER and video-text models like ALPRO, Frozen-in-Time (FiT), VIOLET. We compare the performance of language representations of stand-alone text encoders of these models to the language representations of text encoders learnt through vision supervision. Our experiments suggest that vanilla language representations show superior performance on most of the tasks. These results shed light on the current drawbacks of the vision-language models.

The categories listed here do not mean to be exhaustive and a question could fall into multiple categories. Playing computer games sink and facing the towels. Albeit these promising advances, their actual performances in real-world embodied environments could still fall short of human expectations, especially in generalization to different situations (scenes and locations) and tasks that require substantial, knowledge-intensive reasoning. To diagnose the fundamental capability of realistic embodied agents, we investigate the problem of embodied scene understanding, where the agent needs to understand its situation and the surroundings in the environment from a dynamic egocentric view, then perceive, reason, and act accordingly, to accomplish complex tasks. What is at the core of embodied scene understanding? Drawing inspirations from situated cognition (Greeno, 1998; Anderson et al., 2000), a seminal theory of embodiment, we anticipate it to be two-fold: Situation understanding. The ability to imagine what the agent will see from arbitrary situations (position, orientations, etc.) in a 3D scene and understand the surroundings anchored to the situation, therefore generalize to novel positions or scenes; Situated reasoning. The ability to acquire knowledge about the environment based on the agents' current situation and reason with the knowledge, therefore further facilitates accomplishing complex action planning tasks. To step towards embodied scene understanding, we introduce SQA3D, a new task that reconciles the best of both parties, situation understanding, and situated reasoning, into embodied 3D scene understanding. Figure 1 sketches our task: given a 3D scene context (e.g., 3D scan, ego-centric video, or bird-eye view (BEV) picture), the agent in the 3D scene needs to first comprehend and localize its situation (position, orientation, etc.) from a textual description, then answer a question that requires substantial situated reasoning from that perspective. We crowd-sourced the situation descriptions from Amazon MTurk (AMT), where participants are instructed to select diverse locations and orientations in 3D scenes. To systematically examine the agent's ability in situated reasoning, we collect questions that cover a wide spectrum of knowledge, ranging from spatial relations to navigation, common sense reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have made significant progress in NLP. However, their ability to memorize, represent, and leverage commonsense knowledge has been a well-known pain point for LLMs. It remains unclear that: (1) Can GPTs effectively answer commonsense questions? (2) Are GPTs knowledgeable in commonsense? (3) Are GPTs aware of the underlying commonsense knowledge for answering a specific question? (4) Can GPTs effectively leverage commonsense for answering questions? To evaluate the above commonsense problems, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate ChatGPT's commonsense abilities, and the experimental results show that: (1) GPTs can achieve good QA accuracy in commonsense tasks, while they still struggle with certain types of knowledge. (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 knowledge for answering a specific question, i.e., ChatGPT does not precisely know what commonsense knowledge is required to answer a question. The above findings raise the need to investigate better mechanisms for utilizing commonsense knowledge in LLMs, such as instruction following, better commonsense guidance, etc.