Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bian, Ning, Han, Xianpei, Lin, Hongyu, Lu, Yaojie, He, Ben, Sun, Le
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Bian, Ning
Han, Xianpei
Lin, Hongyu
Lu, Yaojie
He, Ben
Sun, Le
author_facet Bian, Ning
Han, Xianpei
Lin, Hongyu
Lu, Yaojie
He, Ben
Sun, Le
contents Building machines with commonsense has been a longstanding challenge in NLP due to the reporting bias of commonsense rules and the exposure bias of rule-based commonsense reasoning. In contrast, humans convey and pass down commonsense implicitly through stories. This paper investigates the inherent commonsense ability of large language models (LLMs) expressed through storytelling. We systematically investigate and compare stories and rules for retrieving and leveraging commonsense in LLMs. Experimental results on 28 commonsense QA datasets show that stories outperform rules as the expression for retrieving commonsense from LLMs, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsense accuracy. Moreover, stories are the more effective commonsense expression for answering questions regarding daily events, while rules are more effective for scientific questions. This aligns with the reporting bias of commonsense in text corpora. We further show that the correctness and relevance of commonsense stories can be further improved via iterative self-supervised fine-tuning. These findings emphasize the importance of using appropriate language to express, retrieve, and leverage commonsense for LLMs, highlighting a promising direction for better exploiting their commonsense abilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14355
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models?
Bian, Ning
Han, Xianpei
Lin, Hongyu
Lu, Yaojie
He, Ben
Sun, Le
Computation and Language
Building machines with commonsense has been a longstanding challenge in NLP due to the reporting bias of commonsense rules and the exposure bias of rule-based commonsense reasoning. In contrast, humans convey and pass down commonsense implicitly through stories. This paper investigates the inherent commonsense ability of large language models (LLMs) expressed through storytelling. We systematically investigate and compare stories and rules for retrieving and leveraging commonsense in LLMs. Experimental results on 28 commonsense QA datasets show that stories outperform rules as the expression for retrieving commonsense from LLMs, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsense accuracy. Moreover, stories are the more effective commonsense expression for answering questions regarding daily events, while rules are more effective for scientific questions. This aligns with the reporting bias of commonsense in text corpora. We further show that the correctness and relevance of commonsense stories can be further improved via iterative self-supervised fine-tuning. These findings emphasize the importance of using appropriate language to express, retrieve, and leverage commonsense for LLMs, highlighting a promising direction for better exploiting their commonsense abilities.
title Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14355