Self-Consistent Narrative Prompts on Abductive Natural Language Inference

Abstract

Abduction has long been seen as crucial for narrative comprehension and reasoning about everyday situations. The abductive natural language inference ($\alpha$NLI) task has been proposed, and this narrative text-based task aims to infer the most plausible hypothesis from the candidates given two observations. However, the inter-sentential coherence and the model consistency have not been well exploited in the previous works on this task. In this work, we propose a prompt tuning model $\alpha$-PACE, which takes self-consistency and inter-sentential coherence into consideration. Besides, we propose a general self-consistent framework that considers various narrative sequences (e.g., linear narrative and reverse chronology) for guiding the pre-trained language model in understanding the narrative context of input. We conduct extensive experiments and thorough ablation studies to illustrate the necessity and effectiveness of $\alpha$-PACE. The performance of our method shows significant improvement against extensive competitive baselines.

Accepted at IJCNLP-AACL 2023 main track