We explore incorporating natural language inference (NLI) into the text generative pipeline by using a pre-trained NLI model to assess whether a generated sentence entails, contradicts, or is neutral to the prompt and preceding text. First, we show that the NLI task is predictive of generation errors made by GPT-3. We use these results to develop an NLI-informed generation procedure for GPT-J. Then, we evaluate these generations by obtaining human annotations on error types and overall quality. We find that an NLI strategy of maximizing entailment improves text generation when the nucleus sampling randomness parameter value is high, while one which maximizes contradiction is in fact productive when the parameter value is low. Overall, though, we demonstrate that an NLI strategy of maximizing the neutral class provides the highest quality of generated text (significantly better than the vanilla generations), regardless of parameter value.

In recent years, natural language inference has been an emerging research area. In this paper, we present a novel data augmentation technique and combine it with a unique learning procedure for that task. Our so-called automatic contextual data augmentation (acda) method manages to be fully automatic, non-trivially contextual, and computationally efficient at the same time. When compared to established data augmentation methods, it is substantially more computationally efficient and requires no manual annotation by a human expert as they usually do. In order to increase its efficiency, we combine acda with two learning optimization techniques: contrastive learning and a hybrid loss function. The former maximizes the benefit of the supervisory signal generated by acda, while the latter incentivises the model to learn the nuances of the decision boundary. Our combined approach is shown experimentally to provide an effective way for mitigating spurious data correlations within a dataset, called dataset artifacts, and as a result improves performance. Specifically, our experiments verify that acda-boosted pre-trained language models that employ our learning optimization techniques, consistently outperform the respective fine-tuned baseline pre-trained language models across both benchmark datasets and adversarial examples.

In recent years, fake news detection has been an emerging research area. In this paper, we put forward a novel statistical approach for the generation of feature vectors to describe a document. Our so-called class label frequency distance (clfd), is shown experimentally to provide an effective way for boosting the performance of machine learning methods. Specifically, our experiments, carried out in the fake news detection domain, verify that efficient traditional machine learning methods that use our vectorization approach, consistently outperform deep learning methods that use word embeddings for small and medium sized datasets, while the results are comparable for large datasets. In addition, we demonstrate that a novel hybrid method that utilizes both a clfd-boosted logistic regression classifier and a deep learning one, clearly outperforms deep learning methods even in large datasets.