"Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures

2023/05/23 by Zae Myung Kim, Kim, Zae Myung, David E. Taylor +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #Topic Modeling

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.13826

openalex publication_date 2023/05/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication, recent research indicates that large language models struggle to comprehend these implicatures as effectively as the average human. This paper demonstrates that by incorporating Grice's Four Maxims into the model through chain-of-thought prompting, we can significantly enhance its performance, surpassing even the average human performance on this task.

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