Extractive Fact Decomposition for Interpretable Natural Language Inference in one Forward Pass

Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber


Abstract
Recent works in Natural Language Inference (NLI) and related tasks, such as automated fact-checking, employ atomic fact decomposition to enhance interpretability and robustness. For this, existing methods rely on resource-intensive generative large language models (LLMs) to perform decomposition. We propose JEDI, an encoder-only architecture that jointly performs extractive atomic fact decomposition and interpretable inference without requiring generative models during inference. To facilitate training, we produce a large corpus of synthetic rationales covering multiple NLI benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that JEDI achieves competitive accuracy in distribution and significantly improves robustness out of distribution and in adversarial settings over models based solely on extractive rationale supervision. Our findings show that interpretability and robust generalization in NLI can be realized using encoder-only architectures and synthetic rationales.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1615
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
31680–31693
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1615/
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Cite (ACL):
Nicholas Popovič and Michael Färber. 2025. Extractive Fact Decomposition for Interpretable Natural Language Inference in one Forward Pass. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 31680–31693, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Extractive Fact Decomposition for Interpretable Natural Language Inference in one Forward Pass (Popovič & Färber, EMNLP 2025)
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