Logical reasoning with span-level predictions for interpretable and robust NLI models
File(s)2022.emnlp-main.251.pdf (1.57 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Stacey, Joe
Minervini, Pasquale
Dubossarsky, Haim
Rei, Marek
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) models achieve impressive results, sometimes outperforming humans when evaluating on in-distribution test sets. However, as these models are known to learn from annotation artefacts and dataset biases, it is unclear to what extent the models are learning the task of NLI instead of learning from shallow heuristics in their training data. We address this issue by introducing a logical reasoning framework for NLI, creating highly transparent model decisions that are based on logical rules. Unlike prior work, we show that improved interpretability can be achieved without decreasing the predictive accuracy. We almost fully retain performance on SNLI, while also identifying the exact hypothesis spans that are responsible for each model prediction. Using the e-SNLI human explanations, we verify that our model makes sensible decisions at a span level, despite not using any span labels during training. We can further improve model performance and the span-level decisions by using the e-SNLI explanations during training. Finally, our model is more robust in a reduced data setting. When training with only 1,000 examples, out-of-distribution performance improves on the MNLI matched and mismatched validation sets by 13% and 16% relative to the baseline. Training with fewer observations yields further improvements, both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.
Date Issued
2022-12-07
Date Acceptance
2022-10-06
Citation
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022, pp.3809-3823
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Start Page
3809
End Page
3823
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Copyright Statement
©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics. Material published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
License URL
Source
2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: EMNLP 2022
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-12-07
Finish Date
2022-12-11
Coverage Spatial
Abu Dhabi