MSciNLI: A Diverse Benchmark for Scientific Natural Language Inference

Mobashir Sadat, Cornelia Caragea


Abstract
The task of scientific Natural Language Inference (NLI) involves predicting the semantic relation between two sentences extracted from research articles. This task was recently proposed along with a new dataset called SciNLI derived from papers published in the computational linguistics domain. In this paper, we aim to introduce diversity in the scientific NLI task and present MSciNLI, a dataset containing 132,320 sentence pairs extracted from five new scientific domains. The availability of multiple domains makes it possible to study domain shift for scientific NLI. We establish strong baselines on MSciNLI by fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and prompting Large Language Models (LLMs). The highest Macro F1 scores of PLM and LLM baselines are 77.21% and 51.77%, respectively, illustrating that MSciNLI is challenging for both types of models. Furthermore, we show that domain shift degrades the performance of scientific NLI models which demonstrates the diverse characteristics of different domains in our dataset. Finally, we use both scientific NLI datasets in an intermediate task transfer learning setting and show that they can improve the performance of downstream tasks in the scientific domain. We make our dataset and code available on Github.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.90
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1610–1629
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.90
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.90
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mobashir Sadat and Cornelia Caragea. 2024. MSciNLI: A Diverse Benchmark for Scientific Natural Language Inference. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1610–1629, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MSciNLI: A Diverse Benchmark for Scientific Natural Language Inference (Sadat & Caragea, NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.90.pdf