SylloBio-NLI: Evaluating Large Language Models on Biomedical Syllogistic Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wysocka, Magdalena, Carvalho, Danilo, Wysocki, Oskar, Valentino, Marco, Freitas, Andre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915144132460544
author Wysocka, Magdalena
Carvalho, Danilo
Wysocki, Oskar
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andre
author_facet Wysocka, Magdalena
Carvalho, Danilo
Wysocki, Oskar
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andre
contents Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for Natural Language Inference (NLI). This capability is particularly significant in specialized domains such as biomedicine, where it can support automatic evidence interpretation and scientific discovery. This paper presents SylloBio-NLI, a novel framework that leverages external ontologies to systematically instantiate diverse syllogistic arguments for biomedical NLI. We employ SylloBio-NLI to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on identifying valid conclusions and extracting supporting evidence across 28 syllogistic schemes instantiated with human genome pathways. Extensive experiments reveal that biomedical syllogistic reasoning is particularly challenging for zero-shot LLMs, which achieve an average accuracy between 70% on generalized modus ponens and 23% on disjunctive syllogism. At the same time, we found that few-shot prompting can boost the performance of different LLMs, including Gemma (+14%) and LLama-3 (+43%). However, a deeper analysis shows that both techniques exhibit high sensitivity to superficial lexical variations, highlighting a dependency between reliability, models' architecture, and pre-training regime. Overall, our results indicate that, while in-context examples have the potential to elicit syllogistic reasoning in LLMs, existing models are still far from achieving the robustness and consistency required for safe biomedical NLI applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SylloBio-NLI: Evaluating Large Language Models on Biomedical Syllogistic Reasoning
Wysocka, Magdalena
Carvalho, Danilo
Wysocki, Oskar
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, Andre
Computation and Language
Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for Natural Language Inference (NLI). This capability is particularly significant in specialized domains such as biomedicine, where it can support automatic evidence interpretation and scientific discovery. This paper presents SylloBio-NLI, a novel framework that leverages external ontologies to systematically instantiate diverse syllogistic arguments for biomedical NLI. We employ SylloBio-NLI to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on identifying valid conclusions and extracting supporting evidence across 28 syllogistic schemes instantiated with human genome pathways. Extensive experiments reveal that biomedical syllogistic reasoning is particularly challenging for zero-shot LLMs, which achieve an average accuracy between 70% on generalized modus ponens and 23% on disjunctive syllogism. At the same time, we found that few-shot prompting can boost the performance of different LLMs, including Gemma (+14%) and LLama-3 (+43%). However, a deeper analysis shows that both techniques exhibit high sensitivity to superficial lexical variations, highlighting a dependency between reliability, models' architecture, and pre-training regime. Overall, our results indicate that, while in-context examples have the potential to elicit syllogistic reasoning in LLMs, existing models are still far from achieving the robustness and consistency required for safe biomedical NLI applications.
title SylloBio-NLI: Evaluating Large Language Models on Biomedical Syllogistic Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14399