When Does Meaning Backfire? Investigating the Role of AMRs in NLI

Junghyun Min, Xiulin Yang, Shira Wein


Abstract
Natural Language Inference (NLI) relies heavily on adequately parsing the semantic content of the premise and hypothesis.In this work, we investigate whether adding semantic information in the form of an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) helps pretrained language models better generalize in NLI. Our experiments integrating AMR into NLI in both fine-tuning and prompting settings show that the presence of AMR in fine-tuning hinders model generalization while prompting with AMR leads to slight gains in GPT-4o.However, an ablation study reveals that the improvement comes from amplifying surface-level differences rather than aiding semantic reasoning. This amplification can mislead models to predict non-entailment even when the core meaning is preserved.
Anthology ID:
2025.starsem-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Lea Frermann, Mark Stevenson
Venue:
*SEM
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
202–211
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junghyun Min, Xiulin Yang, and Shira Wein. 2025. When Does Meaning Backfire? Investigating the Role of AMRs in NLI. In Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025), pages 202–211, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Does Meaning Backfire? Investigating the Role of AMRs in NLI (Min et al., *SEM 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.16.pdf