Abstract:Machine learning models such as Transformers or LSTMs struggle with tasks that are compositional in nature such as those involving reasoning/inference. Although many datasets exist to evaluate compositional generalization, when it comes to evaluating inference abilities, options are more limited. This paper presents LogicInference, a new dataset to evaluate the ability of models to perform logical inference. The dataset focuses on inference using propositional logic and a small subset of first-order logic, represented both in semi-formal logical notation, as well as in natural language. We also report initial results using a collection of machine learning models to establish an initial baseline in this dataset.
Abstract:Several studies have reported the inability of Transformer models to generalize compositionally, a key type of generalization in many NLP tasks such as semantic parsing. In this paper we explore the design space of Transformer models showing that the inductive biases given to the model by several design decisions significantly impact compositional generalization. Through this exploration, we identified Transformer configurations that generalize compositionally significantly better than previously reported in the literature in a diverse set of compositional tasks, and that achieve state-of-the-art results in a semantic parsing compositional generalization benchmark (COGS), and a string edit operation composition benchmark (PCFG).