Making Implicit Premises Explicit in Logical Understanding of Enthymemes
Xuyao Feng, Anthony Hunter · Mar 6, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Low trustUse this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.
Evidence quality
Low
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
Real-world arguments in text and dialogues are normally enthymemes (i.e. some of their premises and/or claims are implicit). Natural language processing (NLP) methods for handling enthymemes can potentially identify enthymemes in text but they do not decode their underlying logic, whereas logic-based approaches for handling them assume a knowledgebase with sufficient formulae that can be used to decode them via abduction. There is therefore a lack of a systematic method for translating textual components of an enthymeme into a logical argument and generating the logical formulae required for their decoding, and thereby showing logical entailment. To address this, we propose a pipeline that integrates: (1) a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediate implicit premises based on the explicit premise and claim; (2) another LLM to translate the natural language into logical formulas; and (3) a neuro-symbolic reasoner based on a SAT solver to determine entailment. We evaluate our pipeline on two enthymeme datasets, demonstrating promising performance in selecting the correct implicit premise, as measured by precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy.