Why Natural Language is the Right Vehicle for Complex Reasoning

Abstract:
Despite their widespread success, end-to-end transformer models consistently fall short in settings involving complex reasoning. Transformers trained on question answering (QA) tasks that seemingly require multiple steps of reasoning often achieve high performance by taking "reasoning shortcuts." We still do not have models that robustly combine many pieces of information in a logically consistent way. In this talk, I argue that a very attractive solution to this problem is within our grasp: doing multi-step reasoning directly in natural language. …

language natural natural language reasoning