Before revision:  Prior studies of PTLMs have found inference deficits, but have failed to provide a systematic means of understanding whether these deficits are due to low inference abilities or poor inference robustness . In this work, we address this gap by developing a procedure that allows for the systematized probing of both PTLMs' inference abilities and robustness. Our procedure centers around the methodical creation of logically-equivalent, but syntactically-different sets of probes, of which we create a corpus of 14,400 probes coming from 60 logically-equivalent sets that can be used to probe PTLMs in three task settings.
After revision:  Prior studies of PTLMs have focused on factual world knowledge or the ability to reason when the necessary knowledge is provided explicitly. However, effective communication with humans requires inferences based on implicit commonsense relationships, and robustness despite paraphrasing. In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communication, we propose a new challenge, RICA, that evaluates the capabilities of making commonsense inferences and the robustness of these inferences to language variations. In our work, we develop a systematic procedure to probe PTLMs in three task settings.