Neuro-symbolic Commonsense Social Reasoning

Abstract: Social norms underlie all human social interactions, yet formalizing and reasoning with them remains a major challenge for AI systems. We present a novel system for taking social rules of thumb (ROTs) in natural language from the Social Chemistry 101 dataset and converting them to first-order logic where reasoning is performed using a neuro-symbolic theorem prover. We accomplish this in several steps. First, ROTs are converted into Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which is a graphical representation of the concepts in a sentence, and align the AMR with RoBERTa embeddings. We then generate alternate simplified versions of the AMR via a novel algorithm, recombining and merging embeddings for added robustness against different wordings of text, and incorrect AMR parses. The AMR is then converted into first-order logic, and is queried with a neuro-symbolic theorem prover. The goal of this paper is to develop and evaluate a neuro-symbolic method which performs explicit reasoning about social situations in a logical form.