Conditional Natural Language Inference

Youngwoo Kim, Razieh Rahimi, James Allan


Abstract
To properly explain sentence pairs that provide contradictory (different) information for different conditions, we introduce the task of conditional natural language inference (Cond-NLI) and focus on automatically extracting contradictory aspects and their conditions from a sentence pair. Cond-NLI can help to provide a full spectrum of information, such as when there are multiple answers to a question each addressing a specific condition, or reviews with different opinions for different conditions. We show that widely-used feature-attribution explanation models are not suitable for finding conditions, especially when sentences are long and are written independently. We propose a simple yet effective model for the original NLI task that can successfully extract conditions while not requiring token-level annotations. Our model enhances the interpretability of the NLI task while maintaining comparable accuracy. To evaluate models for the Cond-NLI, we build and release a token-level annotated dataset BioClaim which contains potentially contradictory claims from the biomedical domain. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the full cross-encoder and other baselines in extracting conditions. It also performs on-par with GPT-3 which has an order of magnitude more parameters and trained on a huge amount of data.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.456
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6833–6851
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.456
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.456
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Youngwoo Kim, Razieh Rahimi, and James Allan. 2023. Conditional Natural Language Inference. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6833–6851, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conditional Natural Language Inference (Kim et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.456.pdf