In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), by converting reasoning problems into classification tasks. Our method leverages the LLM’s ability to decide when to call a function from a set of logical-linguistic primitives, each of which can interact with a local “scratchpad” memory and logical inference engine. Invocation of these primitives in the correct order writes the constraints to the scratchpad memory and enables the logical engine to verifiably solve the problem. We additionally propose a formal framework for exploring the “linguistic” hardness of CSP reasoning-problems for LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that under our proposed method, tasks with significant computational hardness can be converted to a form that is easier for LLMs to solve and yields a 40% improvement over baselines. This opens up new avenues for future research into hybrid cognitive models that integrate symbolic and neural approaches.

Despite recent progress in text-to-SQL parsing, current semantic parsers are still not accurate enough for practical use. In this paper, we investigate how to build automatic text-to-SQL error correction models. Noticing that token-level edits are out of context and sometimes ambiguous, we propose building clause-level edit models instead. Besides, while most language models of code are not specifically pre-trained for SQL, they know common data structures and their operations in programming languages such as Python. Thus, we propose a novel representation for SQL queries and their edits that adheres more closely to the pre-training corpora of language models of code. Our error correction model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines.