2022/12/16 by Swarnadeep Saha, Saha, Swarnadeep, Xinyan Yu +7 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.08607
openalex publication_date 2022/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Prompting large language models has enabled significant recent progress in multi-step reasoning over text. However, when applied to text generation from semi-structured data (e.g., graphs or tables), these methods typically suffer from low semantic coverage, hallucination, and logical inconsistency. We propose MURMUR, a neuro-symbolic modular approach to text generation from semi-structured data with multi-step reasoning. MURMUR is a best-first search method that generates reasoning paths using: (1) neural and symbolic modules with specific linguistic and logical skills, (2) a grammar whose production rules define valid compositions of modules, and (3) value functions that assess the quality of each reasoning step. We conduct experiments on two diverse data-to-text generation tasks like WebNLG and LogicNLG. These tasks differ in their data representations (graphs and tables) and span multiple linguistic and logical skills. MURMUR obtains significant improvements over recent few-shot baselines like direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting, while also achieving comparable performance to fine-tuned GPT-2 on out-of-domain data. Moreover, human evaluation shows that MURMUR generates highly faithful and correct reasoning paths that lead to 26% more logically consistent summaries on LogicNLG, compared to direct prompting.