Papers with natural language reasoning
How Pre-trained Word Representations Capture Commonsense Physical Comparisons (D19-60)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained word representations capture common sense on physical properties such as size and weight. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether pre-trained representations capture comparisons and find they have higher accuracy than previous approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models learn a consistent ordering over all the objects in the comparisons. |
Causal Reasoning of Entities and Events in Procedural Texts (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on entity state tracking or event reasoning is limited to procedural texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for causal reasoning of event plausibility and entity states . they represent entities as programming languages while prompting language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human reasoning and event reasoning. |
Reasoning Like Program Executors (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Pi, Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Morteza Ziyadi, Zeqi Lin, Qiang Fu, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing language models are inadequate in reasoning, according to studies . a new reasoning pre-training paradigm is based on pretraining language models with programs . |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning pre-training paradigm that empowers language models to harvest reasoning knowledge possessed by program executors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning pre-training paradigm can boost models' reasoning skills . it can be instantiated by different kinds of program executors and run on a single database . |
Aligning Large Language Models with Recommendation Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)
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Yuwei Cao, Nikhil Mehta, Xinyang Yi, Raghunandan Hulikal Keshavan, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Ed Chi, Maheswaran Sathiamoorthy
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language reasoning, but cannot model complex user-item interactions inherent in recommendation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to equip large language models with recommendation-specific knowledge to address this gap by combining Masked Item Modeling and Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) auxiliary task data samples are generated that encode item correlations and user preferences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Amazon Toys & Games, Beauty, and Sports & Outdoors show that the proposed method outperforms conventional and LLM-based baselines by significant margins in retrieval. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Exploring End-to-End Differentiable Natural Logic Modeling (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate natural logic with neural networks are brittle and prone to fail in the presence of noise and uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate natural logic with neural networks to create differentiable models that integrate natural reasoning with subsymbolic vector representations and neural components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model monotonicity-based reasoning, compared to baseline models without inductive bias. |
CoT-RAG: Integrating Chain of Thought and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Feiyang Li, Peng Fang, Zhan Shi, Arijit Khan, Fang Wang, Weihao Wang, null Zhangxin-hw, Cui Yongjian
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought reasoning has two key limitations: lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and interference from natural language reasoning steps with the models’ inference logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought reasoning framework with three key designs to address these issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large language models on complex tasks by incorporating knowledge graphs and learnable knowledge case-aware RAG. |
Natural Language Reasoning in Large Language Models: Analysis and Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Argumentative reasoning presents unique challenges due to its reliance on context, implicit assumptions, and value judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale evaluation of LLMs' unconstrained natural language reasoning capabilities . they formalise a new strategy designed to evaluate argumentative reasoning in LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on a range of reasoning tasks than other models. |
MAF: Multi-Aspect Feedback for Improving Reasoning in Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance Language Models fail to address diverse error types . generic feedback is a bottleneck for addressing diverse errors in reasoning chains . |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative refinement framework that integrates multiple feedback modules . they propose to address errors in reasoning chains by integrating frozen LMs with external tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in Mathematical Reasoning and Logical Entailment by 20% and 18% respectively. |
ToolGate: Contract-Grounded and Verified Tool Execution for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Jiannan Cao, Xinyi Wang, Songhang Deng, Jintao Chen, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for tool-augmented LLMs rely heavily on natural language reasoning to determine when tools can be invoked and whether their results should be trusted. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward execution framework that provides logical safety guarantees and verifiable state evolution for LLM tool calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the reliability and verifiability of tool-augmented LLM systems while maintaining competitive performance on multi-step reasoning tasks. |
Are LLMs Capable of Data-based Statistical and Causal Reasoning? Benchmarking Advanced Quantitative Reasoning with Data (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Quantitative reasoning with data is a critical skill to analyze data, yet the assessment of such ability remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantitative reasoning with data benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' ability in statistical and causal reasoning with real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model GPT-4 achieves an accuracy of 58%, while open-source model Deepseek-coder-instruct gets the highest accuracy of 37%. |
How Ambiguous Are the Rationales for Natural Language Reasoning? A Simple Approach to Handling Rationale Uncertainty (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models have made significant progress on complex reasoning tasks, but it is impossible to obtain perfect rationales from models or even from humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to guide models to choose between two different reasoning paths depending on the ambiguity of rationales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach leads to robust performance in adversarial scenarios where rationale quality is inconsistent. |
Code over Words: Overcoming Semantic Inertia via Code-Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with semantic inertia, a problem that is often attributed to natural language encoding, which entangles descriptive semantics and logical rules, leading to persistent hallucinations of familiar physics despite explicit contradictory rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples logical dynamics from visual priors via amortized theory induction and counterfactual contrastive alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms expensive inference-time search methods in both efficiency and accuracy. |
Memory-augmented Query Reconstruction for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that confuse tool utilization with knowledge reasoning harm readability and give rise to tool invocation hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple LLM from tool invocation tasks by establishing a memory module with explicit descriptions of query statements and a query memory module to facilitate the KGQA process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on WebQSP and CWQ benchmarks. |
SCOPE: Compress Mathematical Reasoning Steps for Efficient Automated Process Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing process annotation approaches are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based approach that transforms reasoning steps into code and normalizes them through Abstract Syntax Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on Best-of-N strategy and ProcessBench. |
Deliberate Reasoning in Language Models as Structure-Aware Planning with an Accurate World Model (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods struggle with consistency and verification in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structured knowledge representation with learned planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods on math reasoning, logical reasoning, and coding tasks. |