Logical Fallacy Detection

Reasoning is central to human intelligence. However, fallacious arguments are common, and some exacerbate problems such as spreading misinformation about climate change. In this paper, we propose the task of logical fallacy detection, and provide a new dataset (LOGIC) of logical fallacies generally found in text, together with an additional challenge set for detecting logical fallacies in climate change claims (LOGICCLIMATE). Detecting logical fallacies is a hard problem as the model must understand the underlying logical structure of the argument. We find that existing pretrained large language models perform poorly on this task. In contrast, we show that a simple structure-aware classifier outperforms the best language model by 5.46% on LOGIC and 4.51% on LOGICCLIMATE. We encourage future work to explore this task as (a) it can serve as a new reasoning challenge for language models, and (b) it can have potential applications in tackling the spread of misinformation.

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@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2202.13758,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2202.13758},
  
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13758},
  
  author = {Jin, Zhijing and Lalwani, Abhinav and Vaidhya, Tejas and Shen, Xiaoyu and Ding, Yiwen and Lyu, Zhiheng and Sachan, Mrinmaya and Mihalcea, Rada and Schölkopf, Bernhard},
  
  keywords = {Computation and Language (cs.CL), Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Computers and Society (cs.CY), Machine Learning (cs.LG), Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},
  
  title = {Logical Fallacy Detection},
  
  publisher = {arXiv},
  
  year = {2022},
  
  copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International}
}