{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/nature-language-reasoning-a-survey","title":"Natural Language Reasoning, A Survey","arxiv_id":"2303.14725","date":"2023-03-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Fei Yu","Hongbo Zhang","Prayag Tiwari","Benyou Wang"],"abstract":"This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14725v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14725v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"nature-language-reasoning-a-survey","repo_url":"https://github.com/freedomintelligence/reasoningnlp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"logical-reasoning","task_name":"Logical Reasoning"},{"task_slug":"mathematical-reasoning","task_name":"Mathematical Reasoning"},{"task_slug":"multi-hop-question-answering","task_name":"Multi-hop Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-inference","task_name":"Natural Language Inference"},{"task_slug":"philosophy","task_name":"Philosophy"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2303.14725","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.14725","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}