Many NLP tasks can be regarded as a selection problem from a set of options,
such as classification tasks, multi-choice question answering, etc. Textual
entailment (TE) has been shown as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach to
dealing with those selection problems. TE treats input texts as premises (P),
options as hypotheses (H), then handles the selection problem by modeling (P,
H) pairwise. Two limitations: first, the pairwise modeling is unaware of other
options, which is less intuitive since humans often determine the best options
by comparing competing candidates; second, the inference process of pairwise TE
is time-consuming, especially when the option space is large. To deal with the
two issues, this work first proposes a contextualized TE model (Context-TE) by
appending other k options as the context of the current (P, H) modeling.
Context-TE is able to learn more reliable decision for the H since it considers
various context. Second, we speed up Context-TE by coming up with Parallel-TE,
which learns the decisions of multiple options simultaneously. Parallel-TE
significantly improves the inference speed while keeping comparable performance
with Context-TE. Our methods are evaluated on three tasks (ultra-fine entity
typing, intent detection and multi-choice QA) that are typical selection
problems with different sizes of options. Experiments show our models set new
SOTA performance; particularly, Parallel-TE is faster than the pairwise TE by k
times in inference. Our code is publicly available at
this https URL.

本文提出了一种基于文本蕴涵的上下文化选择模型 Context-TE，以及一种能够快速进行推理的并行选择模型 Parallel-TE，这两种模型在三项常见选择问题任务中实现了 state-of-the-art 的性能表现，其中 Parallel-TE 在推理过程中将 pairwise TE 的时间复杂度降低了 k 倍。