Assessing the Sensitivity and Alignment of FOL Closeness Metrics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Thatikonda, Ramya Keerthy, Buntine, Wray, Shareghi, Ehsan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Thatikonda, Ramya Keerthy
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
author_facet Thatikonda, Ramya Keerthy
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
contents The recent successful paradigm of solving logical reasoning problems with tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverages translation of natural language (NL) statements into First-Order Logic~(FOL) and external theorem provers. However, the correctness of FOL statements, comprising operators and text, often go unverified due to the lack of a reliable evaluation metric for comparing generated and ground-truth FOLs. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the sensitivity of existing NL-, FOL-, and graph-based metrics to capture differences between a sampled FOL and its corresponding ground-truth. We then measure the alignment between a metric-based ranking of FOL outputs and a strong LLM as-a-judge. To do this, we first apply operator and text-based perturbations to ground-truth FOL statements to assess metric sensitivity. We then evaluate metric robustness by comparing the metrics against LLMs judgment. Our empirical findings highlight a clear oversensitivity in the n-gram metric BLEU for text perturbations. The operator perturbation affects the semantic graph metric Smatch++ for structural changes, and the FOL metric for specific operator changes. We observe a closer alignment between BertScore and LLM judgement, proving the importance of semantic evaluation. Additionally, we show that combining metrics enhances both robustness and sensitivity compared to using individual metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_08613
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing the Sensitivity and Alignment of FOL Closeness Metrics
Thatikonda, Ramya Keerthy
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
Computation and Language
The recent successful paradigm of solving logical reasoning problems with tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverages translation of natural language (NL) statements into First-Order Logic~(FOL) and external theorem provers. However, the correctness of FOL statements, comprising operators and text, often go unverified due to the lack of a reliable evaluation metric for comparing generated and ground-truth FOLs. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the sensitivity of existing NL-, FOL-, and graph-based metrics to capture differences between a sampled FOL and its corresponding ground-truth. We then measure the alignment between a metric-based ranking of FOL outputs and a strong LLM as-a-judge. To do this, we first apply operator and text-based perturbations to ground-truth FOL statements to assess metric sensitivity. We then evaluate metric robustness by comparing the metrics against LLMs judgment. Our empirical findings highlight a clear oversensitivity in the n-gram metric BLEU for text perturbations. The operator perturbation affects the semantic graph metric Smatch++ for structural changes, and the FOL metric for specific operator changes. We observe a closer alignment between BertScore and LLM judgement, proving the importance of semantic evaluation. Additionally, we show that combining metrics enhances both robustness and sensitivity compared to using individual metrics.
title Assessing the Sensitivity and Alignment of FOL Closeness Metrics
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08613