# Learning to Select from Multiple Options

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [Entailment as Few-Shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14690/) (2021)
- [Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03814/) (2017)
- [ConveRT: Efficient and Accurate Conversational Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03688/) (2019)
- [DialoGLUE: A Natural Language Understanding Benchmark for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13570/) (2020)
- [Ultra-Fine Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04905/) (2018)
- [DocNLI: A Large-scale Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09449/) (2021)
- [Label Verbalization and Entailment for Effective Zero- and Few-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03659/) (2021)
- [Reasoning about Entailment with Neural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06664/) (2015)
- [Learning Natural Language Inference with LSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.08849/) (2015)
- [Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13009/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06349/) (2021)
- [Universal Natural Language Processing with Limited Annotations: Try Few-shot Textual Entailment as a Start](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02584/) (2020)
- [Ultra-Fine Entity Typing with Weak Supervision from a Masked Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04098/) (2021)
- [Modeling Fine-Grained Entity Types with Box Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00345/) (2021)
- [Incremental Few-shot Text Classification with Multi-round New Classes: Formulation, Dataset and System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11882/) (2021)
- [Attentive Pooling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03609/) (2016)
- [Example-Driven Intent Prediction with Observers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08684/) (2020)
- [Textual Entailment for Event Argument Extraction: Zero- and Few-Shot with Multi-Source Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01376/) (2022)
- [Learning to Denoise Distantly-Labeled Data for Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01566/) (2019)
- [Fine-grained Entity Typing via Label Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05744/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11442/) (2023)
- [Recall, Expand and Multi-Candidate Cross-Encode: Fast and Accurate Ultra-Fine Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09125/) (2022)
- [Dense Retrieval as Indirect Supervision for Large-space Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18619/) (2023)
- [All Labels Together: Low-shot Intent Detection with an Efficient Label Semantic Encoding Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03563/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 https://github.com/jiangshdd/LearningToSelect.