English

Language Models Are Poor Learners of Directional Inference

Computation and Language 2022-10-17 v2

Abstract

We examine LMs' competence of directional predicate entailments by supervised fine-tuning with prompts. Our analysis shows that contrary to their apparent success on standard NLI, LMs show limited ability to learn such directional inference; moreover, existing datasets fail to test directionality, and/or are infested by artefacts that can be learnt as proxy for entailments, yielding over-optimistic results. In response, we present BoOQA (Boolean Open QA), a robust multi-lingual evaluation benchmark for directional predicate entailments, extrinsic to existing training sets. On BoOQA, we establish baselines and show evidence of existing LM-prompting models being incompetent directional entailment learners, in contrast to entailment graphs, however limited by sparsity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.04695,
  title  = {Language Models Are Poor Learners of Directional Inference},
  author = {Tianyi Li and Mohammad Javad Hosseini and Sabine Weber and Mark Steedman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.04695},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Findings of EMNLP 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:09:09.692Z