Acquiring and Modelling Abstract Commonsense Knowledge via Conceptualization
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation
Abstract (arXiv)
Conceptualization, or viewing entities and situations as instances of abstract concepts in mind and making inferences based on that, is a vital component in human intelligence for commonsense reasoning. Despite recent progress in artificial intelligence to acquire and model commonsense attributed to neural language models and commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs), conceptualization is yet to be introduced thoroughly, making current approaches ineffective to cover knowledge about countless diverse entities and situations in the real world. To address the problem, we thoroughly study the role of conceptualization in commonsense reasoning, and formulate a framework to replicate human conceptual induction by acquiring abstract knowledge about events regarding abstract concepts, as well as higher-level triples or inferences upon them. We then apply the framework to ATOMIC, a large-scale human-annotated CKG, aided by the taxonomy Probase. We annotate a dataset on the validity of contextualized conceptualizations from ATOMIC on both event and triple levels, develop a series of heuristic rules based on linguistic features, and train a set of neural models to generate and verify abstract knowledge. Based on these components, a pipeline to acquire abstract knowledge is built. A large abstract CKG upon ATOMIC is then induced, ready to be instantiated to infer about unseen entities or situations. Finally, we empirically show the benefits of augmenting CKGs with abstract knowledge in downstream tasks like commonsense inference and zero-shot commonsense QA.
Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 75 of its 185 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2022.
Builds on
75 of 185 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 7; 2024: 5; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
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- 2023CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 28
- 2023CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoningcited by 25
- 2022FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discoverycited by 23
- 2023AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graphcited by 17
- 2024AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimationcited by 14
- 2022Automaton-Based Representations of Task Knowledge from Generative Language Modelscited by 12
- 2024Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasonerscited by 11
- 2023Multimodal Pretrained Models for Verifiable Sequential Decision-Making: Planning, Grounding, and Perceptioncited by 8
- 2023Harvesting Event Schemas from Large Language Modelscited by 6
- 2022PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Populationcited by 5
- 2023QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 4
- 2023Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detectioncited by 4
5 more
- 2024MIKO: Multimodal Intention Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Social-Media Commonsense Discoverycited by 3
- 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoningcited by 3
- 2024Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imaginationcited by 1
- 2026Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 1
- 2024Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddingscited by 0
- 2026Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models23 Jun 2026
- 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning12 Feb 2025
- 2024Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination12 Oct 2024
- 2024Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners18 Jun 2024
- 2024Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddings25 Mar 2024
- 2024MIKO: Multimodal Intention Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Social-Media Commonsense Discovery28 Feb 2024
- 2024AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation16 Feb 2024
- 2023AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph15 Nov 2023
- 2023Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detection18 Oct 2023
- 2023QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering17 Oct 2023
- 2023Multimodal Pretrained Models for Verifiable Sequential Decision-Making: Planning, Grounding, and Perception10 Aug 2023
- 2023CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering24 May 2023
5 more
- 2023Harvesting Event Schemas from Large Language Models12 May 2023
- 2023CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning8 May 2023
- 2022Automaton-Based Representations of Task Knowledge from Generative Language Models4 Dec 2022
- 2022FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery15 Nov 2022
- 2022PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population14 Oct 2022
- 2023CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 28
- 2023CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoningcited by 25
- 2024Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasonerscited by 11
- 2022PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Populationcited by 5
- 2023Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detectioncited by 4
- 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoningcited by 3
- 2024Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imaginationcited by 1
- 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning12 Feb 2025
- 2024Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination12 Oct 2024
- 2024Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners18 Jun 2024
- 2023Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detection18 Oct 2023
- 2023CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering24 May 2023
- 2023CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning8 May 2023
- 2022PseudoReasoner: Leveraging Pseudo Labels for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population14 Oct 2022
- 2022FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discoverycited by 23
- 2023AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graphcited by 17
- 2024AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimationcited by 14
- 2022Automaton-Based Representations of Task Knowledge from Generative Language Modelscited by 12
- 2023Multimodal Pretrained Models for Verifiable Sequential Decision-Making: Planning, Grounding, and Perceptioncited by 8
- 2023Harvesting Event Schemas from Large Language Modelscited by 6
- 2023QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 4
- 2026Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 1
- 2024Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddingscited by 0
- 2026Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models23 Jun 2026
- 2024Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddings25 Mar 2024
- 2024AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation16 Feb 2024
- 2023AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph15 Nov 2023
- 2023QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering17 Oct 2023
- 2023Multimodal Pretrained Models for Verifiable Sequential Decision-Making: Planning, Grounding, and Perception10 Aug 2023
- 2023Harvesting Event Schemas from Large Language Models12 May 2023
- 2022Automaton-Based Representations of Task Knowledge from Generative Language Models4 Dec 2022
- 2022FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery15 Nov 2022
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- 2022Commonsense Knowledge Reasoning and Generation with Pre-trained Language Models: A Survey
- 2026Abductive Reasoning with Probabilistic Commonsense
- 2023CommonsenseVIS: Visualizing and Understanding Commonsense Reasoning Capabilities of Natural Language Models
- 2022Revisiting Generative Commonsense Reasoning: A Pre-Ordering Approach
- 2023Commonsense Knowledge Transfer for Pre-trained Language Models
- 2023UNcommonsense Reasoning: Abductive Reasoning about Uncommon Situations