"Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures

Abstract

Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication, recent research indicates that large language models struggle to comprehend these implicatures as effectively as the average human. This paper demonstrates that by incorporating Grice's Four Maxims into the model through chain-of-thought prompting, we can significantly enhance its performance, surpassing even the average human performance on this task.