Conditional Dichotomy Quantification via Geometric Embedding

Shaobo Cui, Wenqing Liu, Yiyang Feng, Jiawei Zhou, Boi Faltings


Abstract
Conditional dichotomy, the contrast between two outputs conditioned on the same context, is vital for applications such as debate, defeasible inference, and causal reasoning. Existing methods that rely on semantic similarity often fail to capture the nuanced oppositional dynamics essential for these applications. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce a novel task, Conditional Dichotomy Quantification (ConDQ), which formalizes the direct measurement of conditional dichotomy and provides carefully constructed datasets covering debate, defeasible natural language inference, and causal reasoning scenarios. To address this task, we develop the Dichotomy-oriented Geometric Embedding (DoGE) framework, which leverages complex-valued embeddings and a dichotomous objective to model and quantify these oppositional relationships effectively. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and versatility of DoGE, demonstrating its potential in understanding and quantifying conditional dichotomy across diverse NLP applications. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cui-shaobo/conditional-dichotomy-quantification.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.383
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7765–7791
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.383/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shaobo Cui, Wenqing Liu, Yiyang Feng, Jiawei Zhou, and Boi Faltings. 2025. Conditional Dichotomy Quantification via Geometric Embedding. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7765–7791, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conditional Dichotomy Quantification via Geometric Embedding (Cui et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.383.pdf