COLING 2025

How Ambiguous Are the Rationales For Natural Language Reasoning?

Hazel Kim

Studies how uncertain or ambiguous rationales affect reasoning performance, and proposes a simple way for models to choose among reasoning paths when rationale quality is inconsistent.

Overview

Natural language rationales are often treated as clean supervision for reasoning. In practice, those explanations can be incomplete, uncertain, or ambiguous—and models may still be asked to trust them.

This paper studies how ambiguous rationales affect reasoning performance and proposes a simple way for models to choose among reasoning paths when rationale quality is inconsistent.

Why it matters

If explanation quality varies, training and evaluation that ignore that noise can overstate reasoning ability. Understanding and handling rationale ambiguity is a step toward more reliable language-based reasoning systems.

Paper

The full paper is embedded below. You can also download the PDF or view it on arXiv.

Paper PDF

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