Papers › Reasoning about Entailment with Neural Attention

Reasoning about Entailment with Neural Attention

22 Sep 2015arXiv:1509.06664archive 2025-07-28

Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Tomáš Kočiský, Phil Blunsom

While most approaches to automatically recognizing entailment relations have used classifiers employing hand engineered features derived from complex natural language processing pipelines, in practice their performance has been only slightly better than bag-of-word pair classifiers using only lexical similarity. The only attempt so far to build an end-to-end differentiable neural network for entailment failed to outperform such a simple similarity classifier. In this paper, we propose a neural model that reads two sentences to determine entailment using long short-term memory units. We extend this model with a word-by-word neural attention mechanism that encourages reasoning over entailments of pairs of words and phrases. Furthermore, we present a qualitative analysis of attention weights produced by this model, demonstrating such reasoning capabilities. On a large entailment dataset this model outperforms the previous best neural model and a classifier with engineered features by a substantial margin. It is the first generic end-to-end differentiable system that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on a textual entailment dataset.

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codedecde/Recognizing-Textual-Entailment mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
elkhand/QuoraDuplicates mentioned on GitHubtf report
shyamupa/snli-entailment mentioned on GitHubtf report
thomasdic2000/enhancedLSTM mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Natural Language Inference

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Natural Language Inference SNLI 100D LSTMs w/ word-by-word attention % Test Accuracy 83.5 #83 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 100D LSTMs w/ word-by-word attention % Train Accuracy 85.3 #83 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI 100D LSTMs w/ word-by-word attention Parameters 250k #83 of 98 Archive leaderboard report

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