Looking Beyond Sentence-Level Natural Language Inference for Downstream Tasks

Anshuman Mishra, Dhruvesh Patel, Aparna Vijayakumar, Xiang Li, Pavan Kapanipathi and Kartik Talamadupula,

Keywords: Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Text Summarization, Fact Checking

TL;DR: Data driven approach for making NLI more useful for downstream tasks of QA and Summarization.

Abstract: In recent years, the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task has garnered significant attention, with new datasets and models achieving near human-level performance on it. However, the full promise of NLI -- particularly that it learns knowledge that should be generalizable to other downstream NLP tasks -- has not been realized. In this paper, we study this unfulfilled promise from the lens of two downstream tasks: question answering (QA), and text summarization. We conjecture that a key difference between the NLI datasets and these downstream tasks concerns the length of the premise; and that creating new long premise NLI datasets out of existing QA datasets is a promising avenue for training a truly generalizable NLI model. We validate our conjecture by showing competitive results on the task of QA and obtaining the best-reported results on the task of Checking Factual Correctness of Summaries.