1. Can GPT-3 Perform Statutory Reasoning?
- Author
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Blair-Stanek, Andrew, Holzenberger, Nils, and Van Durme, Benjamin
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ,Computer Science - Computation and Language ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,Computation and Language (cs.CL) - Abstract
Statutory reasoning is the task of reasoning with facts and statutes, which are rules written in natural language by a legislature. It is a basic legal skill. In this paper we explore the capabilities of the most capable GPT-3 model, text-davinci-003, on an established statutory-reasoning dataset called SARA. We consider a variety of approaches, including dynamic few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and zero-shot prompting. While we achieve results with GPT-3 that are better than the previous best published results, we also identify several types of clear errors it makes. We investigate why these errors happen. We discover that GPT-3 has imperfect prior knowledge of the actual U.S. statutes on which SARA is based. More importantly, we create simple synthetic statutes, which GPT-3 is guaranteed not to have seen during training. We find GPT-3 performs poorly at answering straightforward questions about these simple synthetic statutes., 10 pages
- Published
- 2023