Papers › e-SNLI: Natural Language Inference with Natural Language Explanations

e-SNLI: Natural Language Inference with Natural Language Explanations

4 Dec 2018NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1812.01193archive 2025-07-28

Oana-Maria Camburu, Tim Rocktäschel, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Phil Blunsom

In order for machine learning to garner widespread public adoption, models must be able to provide interpretable and robust explanations for their decisions, as well as learn from human-provided explanations at train time. In this work, we extend the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset with an additional layer of human-annotated natural language explanations of the entailment relations. We further implement models that incorporate these explanations into their training process and output them at test time. We show how our corpus of explanations, which we call e-SNLI, can be used for various goals, such as obtaining full sentence justifications of a model's decisions, improving universal sentence representations and transferring to out-of-domain NLI datasets. Our dataset thus opens up a range of research directions for using natural language explanations, both for improving models and for asserting their trust.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

OanaMariaCamburu/e-SNLI mentioned in paperpytorch report
qtli/eib mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Natural Language InferenceSentence

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

e-SNLI

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Natural Language Inference e-SNLI ExplainThenPredictAttention (e-InferSent Bi-LSTM + Attention) Accuracy 81.71 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference e-SNLI ExplainThenPredictAttention (e-InferSent Bi-LSTM + Attention) BLEU 27.58 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections