CoRRPUS: Code-based Structured Prompting for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding

AbstractStory generation and understanding—as with all NLG/NLU tasks—has seen a surge in neurosymbolic work. Researchers have recognized that, while large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, they can be augmented with symbolic means to be even better and to make up for many flaws that neural networks have. However, symbolic methods are extremely costly in terms of the amount of time and expertise needed to create them. In this work, we capitalize on state-of-the-art Code-LLMs, such as Codex, to bootstrap the use of symbolic methods for tracking the state of stories and aiding in story understanding. We show that our CoRRPUS system and abstracted prompting procedures can beat current state-of-the-art structured LLM techniques on pre-existing story understanding tasks (bAbI Task 2 and Re³) with minimal hand engineering. This work highlights the usefulness of code-based symbolic representations for enabling LLMs to better perform story reasoning tasks.