# Natural Language Reasoning, A Survey

**Authors:** Fei Yu, Hongbo Zhang, Prayag Tiwari, Benyou Wang  
**arXiv:** [2303.14725](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14725)  
**Date:** 2023-03-26  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2303.14725v2/

## Abstract

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.