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

What it is about

A short paper on indirect answers to yes/no questions, such as «Are you going to Paul's party?» — «I have to work late» (no). It uses the BIG-bench implicature task (492 items) and the LUDWIG test set (600 items). ChatGPT (text-davinci-003) is prompted zero-shot, few-shot, and with chain-of-thought examples that spell out Grice's calculation step by step: the reply is not a literal answer; assume the speaker cooperates; name the missing background fact («work duties take precedence over a party»); conclude yes or no. Accuracy rises from 0.68 to 0.77 to 0.91 on BIG-bench and from 0.63 to 0.71 to 0.87 on LUDWIG, above the average human score of 86% reported for LUDWIG. The authors read this as support for Grice's claim that implicatures can be calculated. Much of the paper is a philosophical discussion of what "understanding" means.

Ideas

I1. The worked chain is a template for the teacher, not for the SLM. When Opus labels indirect answers for the silver (the means field in prag/src/silver.rs), ask for the three named slots the chain contains: literal content, the bridging background fact, and the yes/no conclusion. The bridging fact is then data. Facts that recur («has to work» → cannot attend; «it is raining» → not going out) become entries for a small rule table that the QUD stack (world/src/qud.rs) can apply deterministically to answer polarity.
I2. Measure how far that rule table carries. On our own question–indirect-answer pairs (see the cards on George & Mamidi 2019 and GRICE), count the share Mova answers with polarity and a stated bridging rule, and the share it must leave as «unknown». Unknown is the honest default; a guessed yes/no counts as an error.
I3. Idioms as replies («Is the pope Catholic?», «Absence makes the heart grow fonder») resolve through the expression base (world/src/idioms.rs), which stores meanings. A rhetorical-question idiom with an obvious answer gives that answer's polarity. Add these as tests to the idiom lens.

For Mova

33. Implicature and presupposition §2–3 (maxims, kinds of implicature), 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech §9; prag/src/silver.rs (teacher prompt), world/src/qud.rs, world/src/idioms.rs; measure: polarity accuracy and coverage on our own indirect-answer pairs. The BIG-bench and LUDWIG items are only for tests, after their licences are checked.

Topics: Implicature

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 2305.13826

@misc{kim2023is,
  title = {{"Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures}},
  author = {Kim, Zae Myung and Taylor, David E. and Kang, Dongyeop},
  year = {2023},
  eprint = {2305.13826},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13826}
}

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