Topological Analysis of Contradictions in Text
Xiangcheng Wu, Xi Niu, Ruhani Rahman · Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2022
Automatically finding contradictions from text is a fundamental yet under-studied problem in natural language understanding and information retrieval. Recently, topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometric shapes, has been shown useful to understand semantics of text. This study presents a topological approach to enhancing deep learning models in detecting contradictions in text. In addition, in order to better understand contradictions, we propose a classification with six types of contradictions. Following that, the topologically enhanced models are evaluated with different contradictions types, as well as different text genres. Overall we have demonstrated the usefulness of topological features in finding contradictions, especially the more latent and more complex contradictions in text.