Pragmatic Inference Chain (PIC) Improving LLMs' Reasoning of Authentic Implicit Toxic Language
Summary
The authors examine how LLMs recognize implicit toxic language. In real online conversations, such language is disguised to evade censorship. Understanding it requires a chain of pragmatic inferences rather than purely logical reasoning. For evaluation, they compiled a Chinese dataset of gender-targeted "post–comment" pairs from Weibo and RedNote. Expert linguists annotated these pairs and, for a subset of the toxic examples, wrote down step-by-step reasoning. The authors took Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory as their basis and, drawing on their experiments, turned its stages into a prompting method, Pragmatic Inference Chain (PIC). Several PIC variants were compared with five baseline prompts, including CoT and rule-based, on GPT-4o, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct, DeepSeek-v2.5, DeepSeek-v3 and QwQ32b. Without PIC, the models barely exceed chance level. With PIC, their performance improves by 12–20%, and their reasoning becomes more explicit and coherent. The work shows that LLMs' weaknesses in pragmatics can be partially remedied through in-context learning. The method is likely applicable to other pragmatic inference tasks as well, such as understanding humor or metaphors.
Key points
- The data were collected using 55 gender-related keywords. These words were taken from Zhihu users' self-reports, meaning that no explicitly toxic terms are among them. For each keyword, 10 posts were collected, and for each post, the 10 most popular comments. After manual cleaning, 4000 pairs remained, of which 3097 were used in the experiments.
- The annotation was carried out by two linguist annotators specializing in pragmatics. Each pair was assigned to one of four classes: non-toxic, toxicity toward women, toxicity toward men, anti-toxicity. For 400 toxic texts, the annotators manually wrote inference chains following Relevance Theory.
- PIC was tested in four variants: one-shot, step-by-step instructions only, instructions + 3 PIC examples, and instructions + rules. Baseline prompts: zero-shot, three-shot, CoT, rule, rule + CoT.
- PIC yields a 12–20% performance gain over the baseline prompts. The main effect comes from the step-by-step instructions themselves, while additional examples change almost nothing.
- The authors propose distilling or fine-tuning models on machine-generated PICs in future work. However, such chains are sometimes incomplete: they do not account for all linguistic cues, even though their conclusion is correct.
Topics Language models & pretraining Reasoning Bias, fairness & safety
Cite
Cite as Xi Chen and Shuo Wang. 2025. Pragmatic Inference Chain (PIC) Improving LLMs' Reasoning of Authentic Implicit Toxic Language. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
@inproceedings{chen2025pragmatic,
title = {{Pragmatic Inference Chain (PIC) Improving LLMs' Reasoning of Authentic Implicit Toxic Language}},
author = {Xi Chen and Shuo Wang},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.296},
eprint = {2503.01539},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.296}
}References
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