Enhancing natural language inference using new and expanded training data sets and new learning models

Natural Language Inference (NLI) plays an important role in many natural language processing tasks such as question answering. However, existing NLI modules that are trained on existing NLI datasets have several drawbacks. For example, they do not capture the notion of entity and role well and often end up making mistakes such as “Peter signed a deal” can be inferred from “John signed a deal”. As part of this work, we have developed two datasets that help mitigate such issues and make the systems better at understanding the notion of “entities” and “roles”. After training the existing models on the new dataset we observe that the existing models do not perform well on one of the new benchmark. We then propose a modification to the “word-to-word” attention function which has been uniformly reused across several popular NLI architectures. The resulting models perform as well as their unmodified counterparts on the existing benchmarks and perform significantly well on the new benchmarks that emphasize “roles” and “entities”.