Making inferences in text comprehension to understand the meaning is essential in language processing. This work studies the entailment verification (EV) problem of complex, multi-sentence premises requiring a system to make multiple inferences implicitly. Modern applications of EV in detecting inconsistent model-generated rationales require complex multi-hop reasoning. However, current textual inference datasets mostly contain short-sentence premises that partially focus on this. To address this, we compile an EV benchmark that includes datasets from three NLP domains (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) containing multi-sentence premises. On benchmarking humans and LLMs, we find that LLMs are better than humans in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans perform better in simple deductive reasoning tasks. We also finetune a Flan-T5 model for EV using two training objectives to obtain a strong open-source model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals GPT-4. Finally, we use our finetuned model to filter out inconsistent model-generated rationales in self-consistency decoding, resulting in a 6% accuracy improvement on average across three MCQ datasets.

Though linguistic knowledge emerges during large-scale language model pretraining, recent work attempt to explicitly incorporate human-defined linguistic priors into task-specific fine-tuning. Infusing language models with syntactic or semantic knowledge from parsers has shown improvements on many language understanding tasks. To further investigate the effectiveness of structural linguistic priors, we conduct empirical study of replacing parsed graphs or trees with trivial ones (rarely carrying linguistic knowledge e.g., balanced tree) for tasks in the GLUE benchmark. Encoding with trivial graphs achieves competitive or even better performance in fully-supervised and few-shot settings. It reveals that the gains might not be significantly attributed to explicit linguistic priors but rather to more feature interactions brought by fusion layers. Hence we call for attention to using trivial graphs as necessary baselines to design advanced knowledge fusion methods in the future.