Atomic-SNLI: Fine-Grained Natural Language Inference through Atomic Fact Decomposition

Abstract: Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) systems primarily operate at the sentence level, providing black-box decisions that lack explanatory power. While atomic-level NLI offers a promising alternative by decomposing hypotheses into individual facts, we demonstrate that the conventional assumption that a hypothesis is entailed only when all its atomic facts are entailed fails in practice due to models' poor performance on fine-grained reasoning. Our analysis reveals that existing models perform substantially worse on atomic level inference compared to sentence level tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce Atomic-SNLI, a novel dataset constructed by decomposing SNLI and enriching it with carefully curated atomic level examples through linguistically informed generation strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on Atomic-SNLI achieve significant improvements in atomic reasoning capabilities while maintaining strong sentence level performance, enabling both accurate judgements and transparent, explainable results at the fact level.