Enhancing Syllogistic Reasoning in Biomedical NLI: Key Insights and Challenges

Table of Links Abstract and Introduction SylloBio-NLI Empirical Evaluation Related Work Conclusions Limitations and References A. Formalization of the SylloBio-NLI Resource Generation Process B. Formalization of Tasks 1 and 2 C. Dictionary of gene and pathway membership D. Domain-specific pipeline for creating NL instances and E Accessing LLMs F. Experimental Details G. Evaluation Metrics H. Prompting LLMs - Zero-shot prompts I. Prompting LLMs - Few-shot prompts J. Results: Misaligned Instruction-Response K. Results: Ambiguous Impact of Distractors on Reasoning L. Results: Models Prioritize Contextual Knowledge Over Background Knowledge M Supplementary Figures and N Supplementary Tables 5 Conclusions In this work, we proposed a novel methodological framework, SylloBio-NLI, designed to evaluate the syllogistic reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs within the biomedical domain. Through comprehensive analysis across 28 syllogistic schemes, we assessed the performance of eight different models under varying conditions, including zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our results show that both techniques exhibit high sensitivity to superficial lexical variations, highlighting a dependency between reliability, models’ architecture, and pre-training regime. Overall, our evaluation indicates that, while few-shot strategies have the potential to elicit syllogistic reasoning in LLMs, existing models are still far from achieving the robustness and consistency required for safe biomedical NLI applications. Authors: (1) Magdalena Wysocka, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (2) Danilo S. Carvalho, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (3) Oskar Wysocki, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and ited Kingdom 3 I; (4) Marco Valentino, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland; (5) André Freitas, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom, Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction SylloBio-NLI Empirical Evaluation Related Work Conclusions Limitations and References Abstract and Introduction Abstract and Introduction SylloBio-NLI SylloBio-NLI Empirical Evaluation Empirical Evaluation Related Work Related Work Conclusions Conclusions Limitations and References Limitations and References A. Formalization of the SylloBio-NLI Resource Generation Process A. Formalization of the SylloBio-NLI Resource Generation Process B. Formalization of Tasks 1 and 2 B. Formalization of Tasks 1 and 2 C. Dictionary of gene and pathway membership C. Dictionary of gene and pathway membership D. Domain-specific pipeline for creating NL instances and E Accessing LLMs D. Domain-specific pipeline for creating NL instances and E Accessing LLMs F. Experimental Details F. Experimental Details G. Evaluation Metrics G. Evaluation Metrics H. Prompting LLMs - Zero-shot prompts H. Prompting LLMs - Zero-shot prompts I. Prompting LLMs - Few-shot prompts I. Prompting LLMs - Few-shot prompts J. Results: Misaligned Instruction-Response J. Results: Misaligned Instruction-Response K. Results: Ambiguous Impact of Distractors on Reasoning K. Results: Ambiguous Impact of Distractors on Reasoning L. Results: Models Prioritize Contextual Knowledge Over Background Knowledge L. Results: Models Prioritize Contextual Knowledge Over Background Knowledge M Supplementary Figures and N Supplementary Tables M Supplementary Figures and N Supplementary Tables 5 Conclusions In this work, we proposed a novel methodological framework, SylloBio-NLI, designed to evaluate the syllogistic reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs within the biomedical domain. Through comprehensive analysis across 28 syllogistic schemes, we assessed the performance of eight different models under varying conditions, including zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our results show that both techniques exhibit high sensitivity to superficial lexical variations, highlighting a dependency between reliability, models’ architecture, and pre-training regime. Overall, our evaluation indicates that, while few-shot strategies have the potential to elicit syllogistic reasoning in LLMs, existing models are still far from achieving the robustness and consistency required for safe biomedical NLI applications. Authors: (1) Magdalena Wysocka, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (2) Danilo S. Carvalho, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (3) Oskar Wysocki, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and ited Kingdom 3 I; (4) Marco Valentino, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland; (5) André Freitas, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom, Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. Authors: Authors: (1) Magdalena Wysocka, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (2) Danilo S. Carvalho, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom; (3) Oskar Wysocki, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and ited Kingdom 3 I; (4) Marco Valentino, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland; (5) André Freitas, National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom, Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Manchester, United Kingdom and Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. available on arxiv