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Main Authors: Sanyal, Soumya, Xiao, Tianyi, Liu, Jiacheng, Wang, Wenya, Ren, Xiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03686
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author Sanyal, Soumya
Xiao, Tianyi
Liu, Jiacheng
Wang, Wenya
Ren, Xiang
author_facet Sanyal, Soumya
Xiao, Tianyi
Liu, Jiacheng
Wang, Wenya
Ren, Xiang
contents Making inferences in text comprehension to understand the meaning is essential in language processing. This work studies the entailment verification (EV) problem of multi-sentence premises that requires a system to make multiple inferences implicitly. Studying EV for such complex premises is important because modern NLP problems, such as detecting inconsistent model-generated rationales, require complex multi-hop reasoning. However, current textual inference datasets mostly contain short premises that only partially focus on these challenges. To address this, we compile an EV benchmark that includes datasets from three NLP domains (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) containing multi-sentence premises. On benchmarking humans and LLMs, we find that LLMs are better than humans in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans perform better in simple deductive reasoning tasks. We also finetune a Flan-T5 model for EV using two training objectives to obtain a strong open-source model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals GPT-4. Finally, we use this model to filter out inconsistent model-generated rationales in self-consistency decoding, resulting in a 6% accuracy improvement on average across three MCQ datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03686
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Machines Better at Complex Reasoning? Unveiling Human-Machine Inference Gaps in Entailment Verification
Sanyal, Soumya
Xiao, Tianyi
Liu, Jiacheng
Wang, Wenya
Ren, Xiang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Making inferences in text comprehension to understand the meaning is essential in language processing. This work studies the entailment verification (EV) problem of multi-sentence premises that requires a system to make multiple inferences implicitly. Studying EV for such complex premises is important because modern NLP problems, such as detecting inconsistent model-generated rationales, require complex multi-hop reasoning. However, current textual inference datasets mostly contain short premises that only partially focus on these challenges. To address this, we compile an EV benchmark that includes datasets from three NLP domains (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) containing multi-sentence premises. On benchmarking humans and LLMs, we find that LLMs are better than humans in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans perform better in simple deductive reasoning tasks. We also finetune a Flan-T5 model for EV using two training objectives to obtain a strong open-source model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals GPT-4. Finally, we use this model to filter out inconsistent model-generated rationales in self-consistency decoding, resulting in a 6% accuracy improvement on average across three MCQ datasets.
title Are Machines Better at Complex Reasoning? Unveiling Human-Machine Inference Gaps in Entailment Verification
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03686