Papers › Neural Tree Indexers for Text Understanding

Neural Tree Indexers for Text Understanding

15 Jul 2016EACL 2017 4arXiv:1607.04492archive 2025-07-28

Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Hong Yu

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) process input text sequentially and model the conditional transition between word tokens. In contrast, the advantages of recursive networks include that they explicitly model the compositionality and the recursive structure of natural language. However, the current recursive architecture is limited by its dependence on syntactic tree. In this paper, we introduce a robust syntactic parsing-independent tree structured model, Neural Tree Indexers (NTI) that provides a middle ground between the sequential RNNs and the syntactic treebased recursive models. NTI constructs a full n-ary tree by processing the input text with its node function in a bottom-up fashion. Attention mechanism can then be applied to both structure and node function. We implemented and evaluated a binarytree model of NTI, showing the model achieved the state-of-the-art performance on three different NLP tasks: natural language inference, answer sentence selection, and sentence classification, outperforming state-of-the-art recurrent and recursive neural networks.

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bitbucket.org/tsendeemts/nti officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

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Tasks

Natural Language InferenceSentenceSentence Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D Full tree matching NTI-SLSTM-LSTM w/ global attention % Test Accuracy 87.3 #46 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D Full tree matching NTI-SLSTM-LSTM w/ global attention % Train Accuracy 88.5 #46 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D Full tree matching NTI-SLSTM-LSTM w/ global attention Parameters 3.2m #46 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D NTI-SLSTM-LSTM encoders % Test Accuracy 83.4 #84 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D NTI-SLSTM-LSTM encoders % Train Accuracy 82.5 #84 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 300D NTI-SLSTM-LSTM encoders Parameters 4.0m #84 of 98 Archive leaderboard report

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