Natural Language Inference (NLI) has garnered significant attention in recent years; however, the promise of applying NLI breakthroughs to other downstream NLP tasks has remained unfulfilled. In this work, we use the multiple-choice reading comprehension (MCRC) and checking factual correctness of textual summarization (CFCS) tasks to investigate potential reasons for this. Our findings show that: (1) the relatively shorter length of premises in traditional NLI datasets is the primary challenge prohibiting usage in downstream applications (which do better with longer contexts); (2) this challenge can be addressed by automatically converting resource-rich reading comprehension datasets into longer-premise NLI datasets; and (3) models trained on the converted, longer-premise datasets outperform those trained using short-premise traditional NLI datasets on downstream tasks primarily due to the difference in premise lengths.

A fundamental component to the success of modern representation learning is the ease of performing various vector operations. Recently, objects with more geometric structure (eg. distributions, complex or hyperbolic vectors, or regions such as cones, disks, or boxes) have been explored for their alternative inductive biases and additional representational capacity. In this work, we introduce Box Embeddings, a Python library that enables researchers to easily apply and extend probabilistic box embeddings. Fundamental geometric operations on boxes are implemented in a numerically stable way, as are modern approaches to training boxes which mitigate gradient sparsity. The library is fully open source, and compatible with both PyTorch and TensorFlow, which allows existing neural network layers to be replaced with or transformed into boxes easily. In this work, we present the implementation details of the fundamental components of the library, and the concepts required to use box representations alongside existing neural network architectures.

Automated Medication Regimen (MR) extraction from medical conversations can not only improve recall and help patients follow through with their care plan, but also reduce the documentation burden for doctors. In this paper, we focus on extracting spans for frequency, route and change, corresponding to medications discussed in the conversation. We first describe a unique dataset of annotated doctor-patient conversations and then present a weakly supervised model architecture that can perform span extraction using noisy classification data. The model utilizes an attention bottleneck inside a classification model to perform the extraction. We experiment with several variants of attention scoring and projection functions and propose a novel transformer-based attention scoring function (TAScore). The proposed combination of TAScore and Fusedmax projection achieves a 10 point increase in Longest Common Substring F1 compared to the baseline of additive scoring plus softmax projection.

In the recent past, Natural language Inference (NLI) has gained significant attention, particularly given its promise for downstream NLP tasks. However, its true impact is limited and has not been well studied. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the utility of NLI for one of the most prominent downstream tasks, viz. Question Answering (QA). We transform one of the largest available MRC dataset (RACE) to an NLI form, and compare the performances of a state-of-the-art model (RoBERTa) on both these forms. We propose new characterizations of questions, and evaluate the performance of QA and NLI models on these categories. We highlight clear categories for which the model is able to perform better when the data is presented in a coherent entailment form, and a structured question-answer concatenation form, respectively.