Do Transformers Dream of Inference, or Can Pretrained Generative Models Learn Implicit Inferential Rules?

Abstract

Large pretrained language models (LM) have been used successfully for multi-hop question answering. However, most of these directions are not interpretable, as they do not make the inference hops necessary to explain a candidate answer explicitly. In this work, we investigate the capability of a state-of-the-art transformer LM to generate explicit inference hops, i.e., to infer a new statement necessary to answer a question given some premise input statements. Our analysis shows that such LMs can generate new statements for some simple inference types, but performance remains poor for complex, real-world inference types such as those that require monotonicity, composition, and commonsense knowledge.