---
title: "Evaluating Large Language Models with NeuBAROCO:"
description: "The authors build NeuBAROCO, a bilingual English–Japanese resource derived from BAROCO, a… 27 references, cited by 15 papers here."
authors: ["Risako Ando", "Takanobu Morishita", "Hirohiko Abe", "Koji Mineshima", "Mitsuhiro Okada"]
year: 2023
venue: "arXiv:2306.12567"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12567"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2306.12567"
arxiv: "2306.12567"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ando-2023-evaluating-large-language-models-neubaroco/"
---
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# Evaluating Large Language Models with NeuBAROCO: Syllogistic Reasoning Ability and Human-like Biases

**Authors:** Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, [Koji Mineshima](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/koji-mineshima/) and Mitsuhiro Okada · **Year:** 2023 · **Venue:** arXiv:2306.12567 · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12567) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.12567) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2306.12567](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.12567) · [arXiv 2306.12567](https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12567) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4381826854)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [15](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ando-2023-evaluating-large-language-models-neubaroco/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks whether large language models fall into the same reasoning traps that psychologists have documented in people solving syllogisms. The authors build NeuBAROCO, a bilingual English–Japanese resource derived from BAROCO, a question collection previously used to measure human deductive skill, including in twin studies. Each original multiple-choice item was recast in natural language inference format: two premises plus one candidate conclusion, hand-labelled as entailment, contradiction, or neutral. Items are also grouped as symbolic, belief-consistent, or belief-inconsistent, and problems where humans typically slip through conversion errors or atmosphere effects are marked. RoBERTa and BART (English) and GPT-3.5 (English and Japanese) were tested without any solved examples. No model proved dependable. GPT-3.5 answered only about half of the problems correctly. Every system scored lowest on belief-inconsistent items and on conversion and atmosphere cases, where RoBERTa and BART were close to zero. The work connects cognitive-science research on reasoning biases with LLM evaluation. It also shows that the bias pattern appears in two typologically distant languages.

## Key points
- NeuBAROCO has 375 inference problems: 122 entailment, 71 contradiction and 182 neutral. They were derived from BAROCO-ALL, a 200-question subset of BAROCO (Shikishima et al.).
- The evaluation covers three human-like biases: belief bias, conversion errors and atmosphere effects. Problems are also split by content type (symbol / consistent / inconsistent).
- Overall accuracy was:
  - RoBERTa: 34.67%
  - BART: 35.20%
  - GPT-3.5 (English): 51.73%
  - GPT-3.5 (Japanese): 48.27%
- English GPT-3.5 handled entailment well (79.51%) but struggled with contradiction (38.03%) and neutral items (38.46%).
- On bias-prone items, accuracy dropped sharply:
  - Conversion: 0% for RoBERTa, 1.43% for BART, 25.71% for GPT-3.5 (EN) and 21.43% for GPT-3.5 (JA).
  - Atmosphere: 0% for RoBERTa, 0.96% for BART, 39.42% for GPT-3.5 (EN) and 22.12% for GPT-3.5 (JA).
  - Belief-inconsistent: the weakest content category for every model, with GPT-3.5 (EN) at 31.37%.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Keio University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/keio-university/) — University, Tokyo, Japan · 7 works · 882 citations

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🧭 Topics (3): [🧠 Language models & pretraining](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/) · 3,320 works · [🧮 Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/) · 1,426 works · [📏 Evaluation & benchmarks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/) · 1,220 works

## Cite

Cite as: Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima and Mitsuhiro Okada. 2023. Evaluating Large Language Models with NeuBAROCO: Syllogistic Reasoning Ability and Human-like Biases. arXiv:2306.12567.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{ando2023evaluating,
  title = {{Evaluating Large Language Models with NeuBAROCO: Syllogistic Reasoning Ability and Human-like Biases}},
  author = {Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima and Mitsuhiro Okada},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2306.12567},
  eprint = {2306.12567},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.12567}
}
```

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*Updated 31 October 2026*
