One of the cardinal tasks in achieving robust medical question answering systems is textual entailment. The existing approaches make use of an ensemble of pre-trained language models or data augmentation, often to clock higher numbers on the validation metrics. However, two major shortcomings impede higher success in identifying entailment: (1) understanding the focus/intent of the question and (2) ability to utilize the real-world background knowledge to capture the context beyond the sentence. In this paper, we present a novel Medical Knowledge-Enriched Textual Entailment framework that allows the model to acquire a semantic and global representation of the input medical text with the help of a relevant domain-specific knowledge graph. We evaluate our framework on the benchmark MEDIQA-RQE dataset and manifest that the use of knowledge enriched dual-encoding mechanism help in achieving an absolute improvement of 8.27% over SOTA language models. We have made the source code available here.
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）
Typed entailment graphs try to learn the entailment relations between predicates from text and model them as edges between predicate nodes. The construction of entailment graphs usually suffers from severe sparsity and unreliability of distributional similarity. We propose a two-stage method, Entailment Graph with Textual Entailment and Transitivity (EGT2). EGT2 learns local entailment relations by recognizing possible textual entailment between template sentences formed by typed CCG-parsed predicates. Based on the generated local graph, EGT2 then uses three novel soft transitivity constraints…
A standard way to address different NLP problems is by first constructing a problem-specific dataset, then building a model to fit this dataset. To build the ultimate artificial intelligence, we desire a single machine that can handle diverse new problems, for which task-specific annotations are limited. We bring up textual entailment as a unified solver for such NLP problems. However, current research of textual entailment has not spilled much ink on the following questions: (i) How well does a pretrained textual entailment system generalize across domains with only a handful of domain-specif…
In this paper, we present a new corpus of entailment problems. This corpus combines the following characteristics: 1. it is precise (does not leave out implicit hypotheses) 2. it is based on "real-world" texts (i.e. most of the premises were written for purposes other than testing textual entailment). 3. its size is 150. The corpus was constructed by taking problems from the Real Text Entailment and discovering missing hypotheses using a crowd of experts. We believe that this corpus constitutes a first step towards wide-coverage testing of precise natural-language inference systems.
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. It refers to the directional relation between text fragments such that the "premise" can infer "hypothesis". In recent years deep learning methods have achieved great success in this task. Many of them have considered the inter-sentence word-word interactions between the premise-hypothesis pairs, however, few of them considered the "asymmetry" of these interactions. Different from paraphrase identification or sentence similarity evaluation, textual entailment is essentially determining a directional (asymmetric) relation …
This dissertation explores the linguistic and computational aspects of the meaning relations that can hold between two or more complex linguistic expressions (phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs). In particular, it focuses on Paraphrasing, Textual Entailment, Contradiction, and Semantic Similarity. In Part I: "Similarity at the Level of Words and Phrases", I study the Distributional Hypothesis (DH) and explore several different methodologies for quantifying semantic similarity at the levels of words and short phrases. In Part II: "Paraphrase Typology and Paraphrase Identification", I focus…
The aim of this paper is to show how we can handle the Recognising Textual Entailment (RTE) task by using Description Logics (DLs). To do this, we propose a representation of natural language semantics in DLs inspired by existing representations in first-order logic. But our most significant contribution is the definition of two novel inference tasks: A-Box saturation and subgraph detection which are crucial for our approach to RTE.
This paper presents the submissions by Team Dr.Quad to the ACL-BioNLP 2019 shared task on Textual Inference and Question Entailment in the Medical Domain. Our system is based on the prior work Liu et al. (2019) which uses a multi-task objective function for textual entailment. In this work, we explore different strategies for generalizing state-of-the-art language understanding models to the specialized medical domain. Our results on the shared task demonstrate that incorporating domain knowledge through data augmentation is a powerful strategy for addressing challenges posed by specialized do…
Deep learning techniques are increasingly popular in the textual entailment task, overcoming the fragility of traditional discrete models with hard alignments and logics. In particular, the recently proposed attention models (Rocktäschel et al., 2015; Wang and Jiang, 2015) achieves state-of-the-art accuracy by computing soft word alignments between the premise and hypothesis sentences. However, there remains a major limitation: this line of work completely ignores syntax and recursion, which is helpful in many traditional efforts. We show that it is beneficial to extend the attention model to …
Ochanomizu University（御茶水女子大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）
A large amount of research about multimodal inference across text and vision has been recently developed to obtain visually grounded word and sentence representations. In this paper, we use logic-based representations as unified meaning representations for texts and images and present an unsupervised multimodal logical inference system that can effectively prove entailment relations between them. We show that by combining semantic parsing and theorem proving, the system can handle semantically complex sentences for visual-textual inference.
In this paper we present two original methods for recognizing textual inference. First one is a modified resolution method such that some linguistic considerations are introduced in the unification of two atoms. The approach is possible due to the recent methods of transforming texts in logic formulas. Second one is based on semantic relations in text, as presented in WordNet. Some similarities between these two methods are remarked.
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
This work deals with SciTail, a natural entailment challenge derived from a multi-choice question answering problem. The premises and hypotheses in SciTail were generated with no awareness of each other, and did not specifically aim at the entailment task. This makes it more challenging than other entailment data sets and more directly useful to the end-task -- question answering. We propose DEISTE (deep explorations of inter-sentence interactions for textual entailment) for this entailment task. Given word-to-word interactions between the premise-hypothesis pair ($P$, $H$), DEISTE consists of…
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
We seek to address the lack of labeled data (and high cost of annotation) for textual entailment in some domains. To that end, we first create (for experimental purposes) an entailment dataset for the clinical domain, and a highly competitive supervised entailment system, ENT, that is effective (out of the box) on two domains. We then explore self-training and active learning strategies to address the lack of labeled data. With self-training, we successfully exploit unlabeled data to improve over ENT by 15% F-score on the newswire domain, and 13% F-score on clinical data. On the other hand, ou…
In this chapter, we introduce a new dialogical system for first order classical logic which is close to natural language argumentation, and we prove its completeness with respect to usual classical validity. We combine our dialogical system with the Grail syntactic and semantic parser developed by the second author in order to address automated textual entailment, that is, we use it for deciding whether or not a sentence is a consequence of a short text. This work-which connects natural language semantics and argumentation with dialogical logic-can be viewed as a step towards an inferentialist…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Saleforce Research（赛富时研究院）；Huski Inc（哈士奇公司）
The explosion of e-commerce has caused the need for processing and analysis of product titles, like entity typing in product titles. However, the rapid activity in e-commerce has led to the rapid emergence of new entities, which is difficult to be solved by general entity typing. Besides, product titles in e-commerce have very different language styles from text data in general domain. In order to handle new entities in product titles and address the special language styles problem of product titles in e-commerce domain, we propose our textual entailment model with continuous prompt tuning bas…
We propose a system for automated essay grading using ontologies and textual entailment. The process of textual entailment is guided by hypotheses, which are extracted from a domain ontology. Textual entailment checks if the truth of the hypothesis follows from a given text. We enact textual entailment to compare students answer to a model answer obtained from ontology. We validated the solution against various essays written by students in the chemistry domain.
Barnard College, Data Science Institute, Columbia University（巴纳德学院、数据科学研究所、哥伦比亚大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) was proposed as a unified evaluation framework to compare semantic understanding of different NLP systems. In this survey paper, we provide an overview of different approaches for evaluating and understanding the reasoning capabilities of NLP systems. We then focus our discussion on RTE by highlighting prominent RTE datasets as well as advances in RTE dataset that focus on specific linguistic phenomena that can be used to evaluate NLP systems on a fine-grained level. We conclude by arguing that when evaluating NLP systems, the community should utilize newly…
HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technologies（HiTZ巴斯克语言技术中心）；Raytheon BBN Technologies（雷神BBN技术公司）；University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克大学UPV/EHU）
Recent work has shown that NLP tasks such as Relation Extraction (RE) can be recasted as Textual Entailment tasks using verbalizations, with strong performance in zero-shot and few-shot settings thanks to pre-trained entailment models. The fact that relations in current RE datasets are easily verbalized casts doubts on whether entailment would be effective in more complex tasks. In this work we show that entailment is also effective in Event Argument Extraction (EAE), reducing the need of manual annotation to 50% and 20% in ACE and WikiEvents respectively, while achieving the same performance …
Recognizing textual entailment is a fundamental task in a variety of text mining or natural language processing applications. This paper proposes a simple neural model for RTE problem. It first matches each word in the hypothesis with its most-similar word in the premise, producing an augmented representation of the hypothesis conditioned on the premise as a sequence of word pairs. The LSTM model is then used to model this augmented sequence, and the final output from the LSTM is fed into a softmax layer to make the prediction. Besides the base model, in order to enhance its performance, we al…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We define a novel textual entailment task that requires inference over multiple premise sentences. We present a new dataset for this task that minimizes trivial lexical inferences, emphasizes knowledge of everyday events, and presents a more challenging setting for textual entailment. We evaluate several strong neural baselines and analyze how the multiple premise task differs from standard textual entailment.
VLSP 2023 -- LTER: A Summary of the Challenge on Legal Textual Entailment Recognition
Vietnam Judicial Academy（越南司法学院）；Hanoi Law University（河内法律大学）；Hung Yen University of Technology and Education（兴安工业大学）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Science（胡志明市科学大学）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本先进科学技术学院）；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数学研究所）；National Institute of Informatics（情报学研究所）
In this paper we present the model used by the team Rivercorners for the 2017 RepEval shared task. First, our model separately encodes a pair of sentences into variable-length representations by using a bidirectional LSTM. Later, it creates fixed-length raw representations by means of simple aggregation functions, which are then refined using an attention mechanism. Finally it combines the refined representations of both sentences into a single vector to be used for classification. With this model we obtained test accuracies of 72.057% and 72.055% in the matched and mismatched evaluation track…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pret…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs) can add value, in addition to the textual content, by providing background knowledge that may be critical for a task. However, the proposed models do not fully exploit the information in the usually large and noisy KGs, and it is not clear how it can be effectively encoded to be useful for entailment. We present an approach t…
In this paper, we introduce the problem of knowledge graph contextualization -- that is, given a specific NLP task, the problem of extracting meaningful and relevant sub-graphs from a given knowledge graph. The task in the case of this paper is the textual entailment problem, and the context is a relevant sub-graph for an instance of the textual entailment problem -- where given two sentences p and h, the entailment relationship between them has to be predicted automatically. We base our methodology on finding paths in a cost-customized external knowledge graph, and building the most relevant …
The quality of training data is one of the crucial problems when a learning-centered approach is employed. This paper proposes a new method to investigate the quality of a large corpus designed for the recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task. The proposed method, which is inspired by a statistical hypothesis test, consists of two phases: the first phase is to introduce the predictability of textual entailment labels as a null hypothesis which is extremely unacceptable if a target corpus has no hidden bias, and the second phase is to test the null hypothesis using a Naive Bayes model. The exp…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Educational Testing Service（教育考试服务中心）；Barnard College（巴纳德学院）
We introduce a collection of recognizing textual entailment (RTE) datasets focused on figurative language. We leverage five existing datasets annotated for a variety of figurative language -- simile, metaphor, and irony -- and frame them into over 12,500 RTE examples.We evaluate how well state-of-the-art models trained on popular RTE datasets capture different aspects of figurative language. Our results and analyses indicate that these models might not sufficiently capture figurative language, struggling to perform pragmatic inference and reasoning about world knowledge. Ultimately, our datase…
University of Malta（马耳他大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Capturing semantic relations between sentences, such as entailment, is a long-standing challenge for computational semantics. Logic-based models analyse entailment in terms of possible worlds (interpretations, or situations) where a premise P entails a hypothesis H iff in all worlds where P is true, H is also true. Statistical models view this relationship probabilistically, addressing it in terms of whether a human would likely infer H from P. In this paper, we wish to bridge these two perspectives, by arguing for a visually-grounded version of the Textual Entailment task. Specifically, we as…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) are widely used benchmark tasks for compositional evaluation of pre-trained language models. Despite growing interest in linguistic universals, most NLI/STS studies have focused almost exclusively on English. In particular, there are no available multilingual NLI/STS datasets in Japanese, which is typologically different from English and can shed light on the currently controversial behavior of language models in matters such as sensitivity to word order and case particles. Against this background, we introduce JSICK, a Jap…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
We consider the problem of learning textual entailment models with limited supervision (5K-10K training examples), and present two complementary approaches for it. First, we propose knowledge-guided adversarial example generators for incorporating large lexical resources in entailment models via only a handful of rule templates. Second, to make the entailment model - a discriminator - more robust, we propose the first GAN-style approach for training it using a natural language example generator that iteratively adjusts based on the discriminator's performance. We demonstrate effectiveness usin…
Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）
Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural lang…
Textual Entailment Recognition with Semantic Features from Empirical Text Representation
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT（弗劳恩霍夫应用信息技术研究所FIT）；University of Siegen（锡根大学）；Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University（哈吉·穆罕默德·达内什科技大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉工程技术大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences（波恩-莱茵-锡格应用科学大学）
Natural language inference (NLI) data has proven useful in benchmarking and, especially, as pretraining data for tasks requiring language understanding. However, the crowdsourcing protocol that was used to collect this data has known issues and was not explicitly optimized for either of these purposes, so it is likely far from ideal. We propose four alternative protocols, each aimed at improving either the ease with which annotators can produce sound training examples or the quality and diversity of those examples. Using these alternatives and a fifth baseline protocol, we collect and compare …
The ability to understand logical relationships between sentences is an important task in language understanding. To aid in progress for this task, researchers have collected datasets for machine learning and evaluation of current systems. However, like in the crowdsourced Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, some biases in the data inevitably occur. In our experiments, we find that performing classification on just the hypotheses on the SNLI dataset yields an accuracy of 64%. We analyze the bias extent in the SNLI and the MultiNLI dataset, discuss its implication, and propose a simple method…
Black-Box Analysis: GPTs Across Time in Legal Textual Entailment Task
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
This document gives a knowledge-oriented analysis of about 20 interesting Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) examples, drawn from the 2005 RTE5 competition test set. The analysis ignores shallow statistical matching techniques between T and H, and rather asks: What would it take to reasonably infer that T implies H? What world knowledge would be needed for this task? Although such knowledge-intensive techniques have not had much success in RTE evaluations, ultimately an intelligent system should be expected to know and deploy this kind of world knowledge required to perform this kind of reas…
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）
RTE is a significant problem and is a reasonably active research community. The proposed research works on the approach to this problem are pretty diverse with many different directions. For Vietnamese, the RTE problem is moderately new, but this problem plays a vital role in natural language understanding systems. Currently, methods to solve this problem based on contextual word representation learning models have given outstanding results. However, Vietnamese is a semantically rich language. Therefore, in this paper, we want to present an experiment combining semantic word representation thr…
Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
Getting an overview over the legal domain has become challenging, especially in a broad, international context. Legal question answering systems have the potential to alleviate this task by automatically retrieving relevant legal texts for a specific statement and checking whether the meaning of the statement can be inferred from the found documents. We investigate a combination of the BM25 scoring method of Elasticsearch with word embeddings trained on English translations of the German and Japanese civil law. For this, we define criteria which select a dynamic number of relevant documents ac…
Pre-trained language models encode undesirable social biases, which are further exacerbated in downstream use. To this end, we propose MABEL (a Method for Attenuating Gender Bias using Entailment Labels), an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representations. Key to our approach is the use of a contrastive learning objective on counterfactually augmented, gender-balanced entailment pairs from natural language inference (NLI) datasets. We also introduce an alignment regularizer that pulls identical entailment pairs along opposite gender directions cl…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Most textual entailment models focus on lexical gaps between the premise text and the hypothesis, but rarely on knowledge gaps. We focus on filling these knowledge gaps in the Science Entailment task, by leveraging an external structured knowledge base (KB) of science facts. Our new architecture combines standard neural entailment models with a knowledge lookup module. To facilitate this lookup, we propose a fact-level decomposition of the hypothesis, and verifying the resulting sub-facts against both the textual premise and the structured KB. Our model, NSnet, learns to aggregate predictions …
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
We introduce a new task of entailment relation aware paraphrase generation which aims at generating a paraphrase conforming to a given entailment relation (e.g. equivalent, forward entailing, or reverse entailing) with respect to a given input. We propose a reinforcement learning-based weakly-supervised paraphrasing system, ERAP, that can be trained using existing paraphrase and natural language inference (NLI) corpora without an explicit task-specific corpus. A combination of automated and human evaluations show that ERAP generates paraphrases conforming to the specified entailment relation a…
Universität zu Köln（科隆大学）；Fraunhofer-Institut FKIE（弗劳恩霍夫FKIE研究所）
We present the architecture and the evaluation of a new system for recognizing textual entailment (RTE). In RTE we want to identify automatically the type of a logical relation between two input texts. In particular, we are interested in proving the existence of an entailment between them. We conceive our system as a modular environment allowing for a high-coverage syntactic and semantic text analysis combined with logical inference. For the syntactic and semantic analysis we combine a deep semantic analysis with a shallow one supported by statistical models in order to increase the quality an…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Tuebingen（图宾根大学）
The recently proposed SNLI-VE corpus for recognising visual-textual entailment is a large, real-world dataset for fine-grained multimodal reasoning. However, the automatic way in which SNLI-VE has been assembled (via combining parts of two related datasets) gives rise to a large number of errors in the labels of this corpus. In this paper, we first present a data collection effort to correct the class with the highest error rate in SNLI-VE. Secondly, we re-evaluate an existing model on the corrected corpus, which we call SNLI-VE-2.0, and provide a quantitative comparison with its performance o…
We computed linguistic information at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels for Recognizing Inference in Text (RITE) tasks for both traditional and simplified Chinese in NTCIR-9 and NTCIR-10. Techniques for syntactic parsing, named-entity recognition, and near synonym recognition were employed, and features like counts of common words, statement lengths, negation words, and antonyms were considered to judge the entailment relationships of two statements, while we explored both heuristics-based functions and machine-learning approaches. The reported systems showed robustness by simultaneo…
The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) shared task was launched to support the development of systems able to verify claims by extracting supporting or refuting facts from raw text. The shared task organizers provide a large-scale dataset for the consecutive steps involved in claim verification, in particular, document retrieval, fact extraction, and claim classification. In this paper, we present our claim verification pipeline approach, which, according to the preliminary results, scored third in the shared task, out of 23 competing systems. For the document retrieval, we implemented a…
Recognizing the entailment relation showed that its influence to extract the semantic inferences in wide-ranging natural language processing domains (text summarization, question answering, etc.) and enhanced the results of their output. For Arabic language, few attempts concerns with Arabic entailment problem. This paper aims to increase the entailment accuracy for Arabic texts by resolving negation of the text-hypothesis pair and determining the polarity of the text-hypothesis pair whether it is Positive, Negative or Neutral. It is noticed that the absence of negation detection feature gives…
