In order to better understand the rationale behind model behavior, recent works have exploited providing interpretation to support the inference prediction. However, existing methods tend to provide human-unfriendly interpretation, and are prone to sub-optimal performance due to one-side promotion, i.e. either inference promotion with interpretation or vice versa. In this paper, we propose a multi-level Mutual Promotion mechanism for self-evolved Inference and sentence-level Interpretation (MPII). Specifically, from the model-level, we propose a Step-wise Integration Mechanism to jointly perform and deeply integrate inference and interpretation in an autoregressive manner. From the optimization-level, we propose an Adversarial Fidelity Regularization to improve the fidelity between inference and interpretation with the Adversarial Mutual Information training strategy. Extensive experiments on NLI and CQA tasks reveal that the proposed MPII approach can significantly outperform baseline models for both the inference performance and the interpretation quality.

Natural Language Inference (NLI), also known as Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), is one of the most important problems in natural language processing. It requires to infer the logical relationship between two given sentences. While current approaches mostly focus on the interaction architectures of the sentences, in this paper, we propose to transfer knowledge from some important discourse markers to augment the quality of the NLI model. We observe that people usually use some discourse markers such as “so” or “but” to represent the logical relationship between two sentences. These words potentially have deep connections with the meanings of the sentences, thus can be utilized to help improve the representations of them. Moreover, we use reinforcement learning to optimize a new objective function with a reward defined by the property of the NLI datasets to make full use of the labels information. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale datasets.