ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness

Multi-step reasoning ability is fundamental to many natural language tasks, yet it is unclear what constitutes a good reasoning chain and how to evaluate them. Most existing methods focus solely on whether the reasoning chain leads to the correct conclusion, but this answer-oriented view may confound reasoning quality with other spurious shortcuts to predict the answer. To bridge this gap, we evaluate reasoning chains by viewing them as informal proofs that derive the final answer. Specifically, we propose ReCEval (Reasoning Chain Evaluation), a framework that evaluates reasoning chains via two key properties: (1) correctness, i.e., each step makes a valid inference based on information contained within the step, preceding steps, and input context, and (2) informativeness, i.e., each step provides new information that is helpful towards deriving the generated answer. We evaluate these properties by developing metrics using natural language inference models and V-Information. On multiple datasets, we show that ReCEval effectively identifies various error types and yields notable improvements compared to prior methods. We analyze the impact of step boundaries, and previous steps on evaluating correctness and demonstrate that our informativeness metric captures the expected flow of information in high-quality reasoning chains. Finally, we show that scoring reasoning chains based on ReCEval improves downstream task performance. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/archiki/ReCEval