Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks involving temporal inference remain challenging for pre-trained language models (LMs). Although various datasets have been created for this task, they primarily focus on English and do not address the need for resources in other languages. It is unclear whether current LMs realize the generalization capacity for temporal inference across languages. In this paper, we present Jamp, a Japanese NLI benchmark focused on temporal inference. Our dataset includes a range of temporal inference patterns, which enables us to conduct fine-grained analysis. To begin the data annotation process, we create diverse inference templates based on the formal semantics test suites. We then automatically generate diverse NLI examples by using the Japanese case frame dictionary and well-designed templates while controlling the distribution of inference patterns and gold labels. We evaluate the generalization capacities of monolingual/multilingual LMs by splitting our dataset based on tense fragments (i.e., temporal inference patterns). Our findings demonstrate that LMs struggle with specific linguistic phenomena, such as habituality, indicating that there is potential for the development of more effective NLI models across languages.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of determining whether a premise entails a hypothesis. NLI with temporal order is a challenging task because tense and aspect are complex linguistic phenomena involving interactions with temporal adverbs and temporal connectives. To tackle this, temporal and aspectual inference has been analyzed in various ways in the field of formal semantics. However, a Japanese NLI system for temporal order based on the analysis of formal semantics has not been sufficiently developed. We present a logic-based NLI system that considers temporal order in Japanese based on compositional semantics via Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) syntactic analysis. Our system performs inference involving temporal order by using axioms for temporal relations and automated theorem provers. We evaluate our system by experimenting with Japanese NLI datasets that involve temporal order. We show that our system outperforms previous logic-based systems as well as current deep learning-based models.