While neural networks produce state-of-the-art performance in several NLP tasks, they generally depend heavily on lexicalized information, which transfer poorly between domains. We present a combination of two strategies to mitigate this dependence on lexicalized information in fact verification tasks. We present a data distillation technique for delexicalization, which we then combine with a model distillation method to prevent aggressive data distillation. We show that by using our solution, not only does the performance of an existing state-of-the-art model remain at par with that of the model trained on a fully lexicalized data, but it also performs better than it when tested out of domain. We show that the technique we present encourages models to extract transferable facts from a given fact verification dataset.

While neural networks produce state-of-the- art performance in several NLP tasks, they generally depend heavily on lexicalized information, which transfer poorly between domains. Previous works have proposed delexicalization as a form of knowledge distillation to reduce the dependency on such lexical artifacts. However, a critical unsolved issue that remains is how much delexicalization to apply: a little helps reduce overfitting, but too much discards useful information. We propose Group Learning, a knowledge and model distillation approach for fact verification in which multiple student models have access to different delexicalized views of the data, but are encouraged to learn from each other through pair-wise consistency losses. In several cross-domain experiments between the FEVER and FNC fact verification datasets, we show that our approach learns the best delexicalization strategy for the given training dataset, and outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers that rely on the original data.