SDF-NN: A Deep Neural Network with Semantic Dropping and Fusion for Natural Language Inference

Abstract

Natural language inference (NLI) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP), and recently, several deep neural network based models have been proposed for NLI. In this work, we first make two important observations regarding NLI: (1) the existence of extra/interfering semantics and its negative impact on the correctness of final inference; and (2) the unbalanced importance of local inference results and the need to combine all local results for aggregation. Motivated by these two observations, we have designed SDF-NN, a new NLI model with two novel components: (1) a Semantic Dropping Network (SDN) to automatically discard some of the interfering semantics; and (2) a Semantic Fusion Alignment (SFA) method to effectively fuse all local inference results. Our model has achieved 88.2% accuracy on the SNLI corpus, which is currently the best performing single model.