Raffaella Bernardi, University of Trento

The Interplay between Language and Reasoning

Thursday 6th February 2025, 16:30. Room L0.06 at LAB42, Amsterdam Science Park, plus live streaming on Zoom. Note the unusual day, unusual time and unusual room.

Large Language Models, and ChatGPT in particular, have recently grabbed the attention of the community and the media. Having reached high language proficiency, attention has been shifting toward its reasoning capabilities. It has been shown that ChatGPT can carry out some simple deductive reasoning steps when provided with a series of facts out of which it is tasked to draw some inferences. In this talk, I will argue for the need for models whose language generation is driven by an implicit reasoning process and a communication goal. To support my claim, I will present two papers recently produced within my group: one evaluates LLMs’ formal reasoning skills (Bertolazzi et al., 2024) and the other focuses on LLMs’ information-seeking strategies (Mazzaccara et al., 2024); to this end, we take syllogisms and the 20-Questions game as test beds. These tasks have been used extensively in cognitive sciences to study human reasoning skills, hence they provide us with a variety of experiments to inspect the language and reasoning interplay in LLMs.