Syntactic Knowledge for Natural Language Inference in Portuguese

Erick Rocha Fonseca, Sandra M. Aluísio

Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of detecting relations such as entailment, contradiction and paraphrase in pairs of sentences. With the recent release of the ASSIN corpus, NLI in Portuguese is now getting more attention. However, published results on ASSIN have not explored syntactic structure, neither combined word embedding metrics with other types of features. In this work, we sought to remedy this gap, proposing a new model for NLI that achieves 0.72 F $$_1$$ score on ASSIN, setting a new state of the art. Our feature analysis shows that word embeddings and syntactic knowledge are both important to achieve such results.