SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding

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Authors: Runcong Zhao, Qinglin Zhu, Hainiu Xu, Bin Ming Liang, Lin Gui, Yulan He
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Understanding character relationships is essential for interpreting complex narratives and conducting socially grounded AI research.However, manual annotation is time-consuming and low in coverage, while large language models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or logically inconsistent outputs.We present Sym-bolicThought, a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning.The system constructs editable character relationship graphs, refines them using seven types of logical constraints, and enables real-time validation and conflict resolution through an interactive interface.To support logical supervision and explainable social analysis, we release a dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with corresponding logical structures.Experiments show that SymbolicThought improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost, offering a practical tool for narrative understanding, explainable AI, and LLM evaluation.The source code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub 1 .

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Natural Language Processing Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
36–46
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN