Pith. sign in

REVIEW 3 cited by

Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2305.07375 v4 pith:VFDCYFPC submitted 2023-05-12 cs.CL cs.AI

Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords causalchatgptreasoningabilitygoodpromptsbettercausality
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Causal reasoning ability is crucial for numerous NLP applications. Despite the impressive emerging ability of ChatGPT in various NLP tasks, it is unclear how well ChatGPT performs in causal reasoning. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of the ChatGPT's causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments show that ChatGPT is not a good causal reasoner, but a good causal explainer. Besides, ChatGPT has a serious hallucination on causal reasoning, possibly due to the reporting biases between causal and non-causal relationships in natural language, as well as ChatGPT's upgrading processes, such as RLHF. The In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques can further exacerbate such causal hallucination. Additionally, the causal reasoning ability of ChatGPT is sensitive to the words used to express the causal concept in prompts, and close-ended prompts perform better than open-ended prompts. For events in sentences, ChatGPT excels at capturing explicit causality rather than implicit causality, and performs better in sentences with lower event density and smaller lexical distance between events. The code is available on https://github.com/ArrogantL/ChatGPT4CausalReasoning .

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Generating Effective CoT Traces for Mitigating Causal Hallucination

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A pipeline generates CoT traces that reduce causal hallucination in small LLMs on event causality tasks, paired with a new Causal Hallucination Rate metric that guides and validates the process.

  2. AI-based Cognitive-linguistic Features for Dementia Assessment in Picture Description

    eess.AS 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    LLMs prompted on seven constructs for picture descriptions distinguish cognitive impairment with 85% accuracy and produce expert-agreed explanations.

  3. Large Language Models for Causal Relations Extraction in Social Media: A Validation Framework for Disaster Intelligence

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    The authors introduce a validation framework showing LLMs can pull causal links from disaster social media but require checks against post-event evidence to avoid relying on model priors.