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Xuyao Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Xuyao Feng.

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Making Implicit Premises Explicit in Logical Understanding of Enthymemes

Real-world arguments in text and dialogues are normally enthymemes (i.e. some of their premises and/or claims are implicit). Natural language processing (NLP) methods for handling enthymemes can potentially identify enthymemes in text but they do not decode their underlying logic, whereas logic-based approaches for handling them assume a knowledgebase with sufficient formulae that can be used to decode them via abduction. There is therefore a lack of a systematic method for translating textual components of an enthymeme into a logical argument and generating the logical formulae required for their decoding, and thereby showing logical entailment. To address this, we propose a pipeline that integrates: (1) a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediate implicit premises based on the explicit premise and claim; (2) another LLM to translate the natural language into logical formulas; and (3) a neuro-symbolic reasoner based on a SAT solver to determine entailment. We evaluate our pipeline on two enthymeme datasets, demonstrating promising performance in selecting the correct implicit premise, as measured by precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy.

cs.CL

Pairwise Logical Selection of Enthymeme Completions under Semantic-Link Uncertainty

Arguments often omit premises or claims, forming enthymemes. We study pairwise logical selection between two candidates for the omitted component. Existing natural language methods can identify or generate candidates but often do not expose how the selected candidate completes the inference, while logic-based approaches usually assume that the required formulae and background knowledge are available. We extend a prior neuro-symbolic pipeline from missing-premise to missing-claim selection and replace binary entailment outcomes with logical-resistance scores. Top-Link uses weighted Partial MaxSAT under a single configuration of highest-confidence semantic links. We then introduce Possible-World Atom-Link Formalization (PWAL), which keeps translated formulae fixed and marginalizes logical resistance over alternative cross-formula semantic-link configurations. We evaluate PWAL on five tasks: ARCT and a CDED-derived task for missing-premise selection, iDebate- and AAE2-derived tasks for missing-claim selection, and alphaNLI for abductive hypothesis selection. Relative to Top-Link, PWAL raises strict accuracy by 2.95-30.86 percentage points and reduces tie rates by 4.57-58.00 percentage points on all five tasks. When ties receive half credit, accuracy still increases by 0.45-6.04 percentage points. PWAL also records the translated formulae, sampled link configurations, and resistance components for every comparison, providing a transparent trace of each score.

cs.AI

Identifying Implicit Premises for Logical Reconstruction of Argument Graphs

The logical reconstruction of argument graphs from natural language text is challenging because of the prevalence of enthymemes (i.e., arguments with implicit premises). There are natural language processing methods for identifying enthymemes in text, and there are symbolic methods based on abduction for identifying missing premises in a logical representation of enthymemes. However, there is a need for methods to generate implicit premises to logically show a known entailment or contradiction relationship between a pair of statements. To address this, we propose a neuro-symbolic pipeline that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate implicit premises that are translated into logical formulae and used with logical formulae representing explicit premises and explicit claims to show the logical relationships between them (entailment, contradiction, or neutrality). Our approach is evaluated on the Microtext Argumentative Corpus.

cs.CL

Identification of Entailment and Contradiction Relations between Natural Language Sentences: A Neurosymbolic Approach

Natural language inference (NLI), also known as Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Most research now uses machine learning and deep learning to perform this task on specific datasets, meaning their solution is not explainable nor explicit. To address the need for an explainable approach to RTE, we propose a novel pipeline that is based on translating text into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph. For this we use a pre-trained AMR parser. We then translate the AMR graph into propositional logic and use a SAT solver for automated reasoning. In text, often commonsense suggests that an entailment (or contradiction) relationship holds between a premise and a claim, but because different wordings are used, this is not identified from their logical representations. To address this, we introduce relaxation methods to allow replacement or forgetting of some propositions. Our experimental results show this pipeline performs well on four RTE datasets.

cs.AI