Can transformers learn to comprehend logical semantics in natural language? Although many strands of work on natural language inference have focussed on transformer models’ ability to perform reasoning on text, the above question has not been answered adequately. This is primarily because the logical problems that have been studied in the context of natural language inference have their computational complexity vary with the logical and grammatical constructs within the sentences. As such, it is difficult to access whether the difference in accuracy is due to logical semantics or the difference in computational complexity. A problem that is much suited to address this issue is that of the model-checking problem, whose computational complexity remains constant (for fragments derived from first-order logic). However, the model-checking problem remains untouched in natural language inference research. Thus, we investigated the problem of model-checking with natural language to adequately answer the question of how the logical semantics of natural language affects transformers’ performance. Our results imply that the language fragment has a significant impact on the performance of transformer models. Furthermore, we hypothesise that a transformer model can at least partially understand the logical semantics in natural language but can not completely learn the rules governing the model-checking algorithm.

How do different generalised quantifiers affect the behaviour of transformer-based language models (TLMs)? The recent popularity of TLMs and the central role generalised quantifiers have traditionally played in linguistics and logic bring this question into particular focus. The current research investigating this subject has not utilised a task defined purely in a logical sense, and thus, has not captured the underlying logical significance of generalised quantifiers. Consequently, they have not answered the aforementioned question faithfully or adequately. Therefore, we investigate how different generalised quantifiers affect TLMs by employing a textual entailment problem defined in a purely logical sense, namely, model-checking with natural language. Our approach permits the automatic construction of datasets with respect to which we can assess the ability of TLMs to learn the meanings of generalised quantifiers. Our investigation reveals that TLMs generally can comprehend the logical semantics of the most common generalised quantifiers, but that distinct quantifiers influence TLMs in varying ways.