{"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/think-about-it-improving-defeasible-reasoning","title":"Think about it! Improving defeasible reasoning by first modeling the question scenario","arxiv_id":"2110.12349","date":"2021-10-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aman Madaan","Niket Tandon","Dheeraj Rajagopal","Peter Clark","Yiming Yang","Eduard Hovy"],"abstract":"Defeasible reasoning is the mode of reasoning where conclusions can be overturned by taking into account new evidence. Existing cognitive science literature on defeasible reasoning suggests that a person forms a mental model of the problem scenario before answering questions. Our research goal asks whether neural models can similarly benefit from envisioning the question scenario before answering a defeasible query. Our approach is, given a question, to have a model first create a graph of relevant influences, and then leverage that graph as an additional input when answering the question. Our system, CURIOUS, achieves a new state-of-the-art on three different defeasible reasoning datasets. This result is significant as it illustrates that performance can be improved by guiding a system to \"think about\" a question and explicitly model the scenario, rather than answering reflexively. Code, data, and pre-trained models are located at https://github.com/madaan/thinkaboutit.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12349v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.12349v1.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":"think-about-it-improving-defeasible-reasoning","repo_url":"https://github.com/madaan/thinkaboutit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.12349","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}