Formal Proofs as Structured Explanations: Proposing Several Tasks on Explainable Natural Language Inference

In this position paper, we propose a way of exploiting formal proofs to put forward several explainable natural language inference (NLI) tasks. The formal proofs will be produced by a reliable and high-performing logic-based NLI system. Taking advantage of the in-depth information available in the generated formal proofs, we show how it can be used to define NLI tasks with structured explanations. The proposed tasks can be ordered according to difficulty defined in terms of the granularity of explanations. We argue that the tasks will suffer with substantially fewer shortcomings than the existing explainable NLI tasks (or datasets).