Compositional Language Understanding with Text-based Relational Reasoning

Abstract

Neural networks for natural language reasoning have largely focused on extractive, fact-based question-answering (QA) and common-sense inference. However, it is also crucial to understand the extent to which neural networks can perform relational reasoning and combinatorial generalization from natural language—abilities that are often obscured by annotation artifacts and the dominance of language modeling in standard QA benchmarks. In this work, we present a novel benchmark dataset for language understanding that isolates performance on relational reasoning. We also present a neural message-passing baseline and show that this model, which incorporates a relational inductive bias, is superior at combinatorial generalization compared to a traditional recurrent neural network approach.

Publication
Relational Representation Learning Workshop, NIPS