ChatGPT Evaluation on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates ChatGPT's ability to understand and classify inter-sentential relations, revealing strengths in causal and discourse relations but challenges with temporal and implicit discourse understanding.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, multi-dataset evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on sentence relations using various prompt templates, establishing baseline scores for relation classification tasks.

Findings

ChatGPT excels at causal relation detection.

Struggles with temporal order identification.

Has difficulty with implicit discourse relations and dialogue parsing.

Abstract

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT's promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.