Learning Natural Language Inference with LSTM

Natural language inference (NLI) is a fundamentally important task in natural language processing that has many applications. The recently released Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) corpus has made it possible to develop and evaluate learning-centered methods such as deep neural networks for the NLI task. In this paper, we propose a special long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture for NLI. Our model builds on top of a recently proposed neutral attention model for NLI but is based on a significantly different idea. Instead of deriving sentence embeddings for the premise and the hypothesis to be used for classification, our solution uses a matching-LSTM that performs word-by-word matching of the hypothesis with the premise. This LSTM is able to place more emphasis on important word-level matching results. In particular, we observe that this LSTM remembers important mismatches that are critical for predicting the contradiction or the neutral relationship label. Our experiments on the SNLI corpus show that our model outperforms the state of the art, achieving an accuracy of 86.1% on the test data.