  Transformers have recently been shown to be capable of reliably performing
logical reasoning over facts and rules expressed in natural language, but
abductive reasoning - inference to the best explanation of an unexpected
observation - has been underexplored despite significant applications to
scientific discovery, common-sense reasoning, and model interpretability.
  We present AbductionRules, a group of natural language datasets designed to
train and test generalisable abduction over natural-language knowledge bases.
We use these datasets to finetune pretrained Transformers and discuss their
performance, finding that our models learned generalisable abductive techniques
but also learned to exploit the structure of our data. Finally, we discuss the
viability of this approach to abductive reasoning and ways in which it may be
improved in future work.
