United Arab Emirates

Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88\% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at \url{
https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA}.

EMNLP 2022

Improving Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Question-to-Action and Question-to-Question Alignment

knowdlege base

question answering

text generation

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

technical paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Hateful meme classification is a challenging multimodal task that requires complex reasoning and contextual background knowledge. Ideally, we could leverage an explicit external knowledge base to supplement contextual and cultural information in hateful memes. However, there is no known explicit external knowledge base that could provide such hate speech contextual information. To address this gap, we propose PromptHate, a simple yet effective prompt-based model that prompts pre-trained language models (PLMs) for hateful meme classification. Specifically, we construct simple prompts and provide a few in-context examples to exploit the implicit knowledge in the pre-trained RoBERTa language model for hateful meme classification. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available hateful and offensive meme datasets. Our experiment results show that PromptHate is able to achieve a high AUC of 90.96, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines on the hateful meme classification task. We also perform fine-grain analyses and case studies on various prompt settings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the prompts on hateful meme classification.

Prompting for Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification

The instruction learning paradigm---where a model learns to perform new tasks from task descriptions alone---has become popular in research on general-purpose models. The capabilities of large transformer models as instruction learners, however, remain poorly understood. We use a controlled synthetic environment to characterize such capabilities. Specifically, we use the task of deciding whether a given string matches a regular expression (viewed as an instruction) to identify properties of tasks, instructions, and instances that make instruction learning challenging. For instance, we find that our model, a fine-tuned T5-based text2text transformer, struggles with large regular languages, suggesting that less precise instructions are challenging for models. Instruction executions that require tracking longer contexts of prior steps are also difficult. We use our findings to systematically construct a challenging instruction learning dataset, which we call Hard RegSet. Fine-tuning on Hard RegSet, our large transformer learns to correctly interpret (with at least 90\% accuracy) only 65.6\% of test instructions, and 11\%-24\% of the instructions in out-of-distribution generalization settings. We thus propose Hard RegSet as a challenging instruction learning dataset, and a controlled environment for studying instruction learning.

What Makes Instruction Learning Hard? An Investigation and a New Challenge in a Synthetic Environment

We propose a sentence-incremental neural coreference resolution system which incrementally builds clusters after marking mention boundaries in a shift-reduce method. The system is aimed at bridging two recent approaches at coreference resolution: (1) state-of-the-art non-incremental models that incur quadratic complexity in document length with high computational cost, and (2) memory network-based models which operate incrementally but do not generalize beyond pronouns. For comparison, we simulate an incremental setting by constraining non-incremental systems to form partial coreference chains before observing new sentences. In this setting, our system outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods by 2 F1 on OntoNotes and 6.8 F1 on the CODI-CRAC 2021 corpus. In a conventional coreference setup, our system achieves 76.3 F1 on OntoNotes and 45.5 F1 on CODI-CRAC 2021, which is comparable to state-of-the-art baselines. We also analyze variations of our system and show that the degree of incrementality in the encoder has a surprisingly large effect on the resulting performance.

Sentence-Incremental Neural Coreference Resolution

Large-scale pretrained language models have made significant advances in solving downstream language understanding tasks. However, they generally suffer from reporting bias, the phenomenon describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text, e.g., ''an orange is orange''. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel approach, Z-LaVI, to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities. Specifically, we leverage two complementary types of ''imaginations'': (i) recalling existing images through retrieval and (ii) synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. Jointly exploiting the language inputs and the imagination, a pretrained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) eventually composes a zero-shot solution to the original language tasks. Notably, fueling language models with imagination can effectively leverage visual knowledge to solve plain language tasks. In consequence, Z-LaVI consistently improves the zero-shot performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks.

Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination

Answering complex questions that require making latent decisions is a challenging task, especially when limited supervision is available. Recent works leverage the capabilities of large language models (LMs) to perform complex question answering in a few-shot setting by demonstrating how to output intermediate rationalizations while solving the complex question in a single pass. We introduce ``Successive Prompting'' where, we iteratively break down a complex task into a simple task, solve it, and then repeat the process until we get the final solution. Successive prompting decouples the supervision for decomposing complex questions from the supervision for answering simple questions, allowing us to (1) have multiple opportunities to query in-context examples at each reasoning step (2) learn question decomposition separately from question answering, including using synthetic data, and (3) use bespoke (fine-tuned) components for reasoning steps where a large LM does not perform well. The intermediate supervision is typically manually written, which can be expensive to collect. We introduce a way to generate synthetic dataset which can be used to bootstrap model's ability to decompose and answer intermediate questions. Our best model (with successive prompting) achieves an improvement in F1 of ~5% when compared with a state-of-the-art model with synthetic augmentations and few-shot version of the DROP dataset.

Successive Prompting for Decomposing Complex Questions

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insufficient for long-horizon complex tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience (e.g., natural language and egocentric vision). We show that our deliberative agent achieves greater than 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent. This enables an in-depth understanding of the agent's capabilities, which shed light on challenges and opportunities for future embodied agents for instruction following. The code is available at https://github.com/sled-group/DANLI.

DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions

Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, most of the LM pre-training objectives only focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn latent-level interpretable representations of sentences. In this paper, we manage to push the language models to obtain a deeper understanding of sentences by proposing a new pre-training objective, Sparse Latent Typing, which enables the model to sparsely extract sentence-level keywords with diverse latent types. Experimental results show that our model is able to learn interpretable latent type categories in a self-supervised manner without using any external knowledge. Besides, the language model pre-trained with such an objective also significantly improves Information Extraction related downstream tasks in both supervised and few-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/renll/SparseLT.

Language Model Pre-Training with Sparse Latent Typing

Authorship obfuscation techniques have commonly been evaluated based on their ability to hide the author's identity (evasion) while preserving the content of the original text. However, to avoid overstating the systems' effectiveness, evasion detection must be evaluated using competitive identification techniques in settings that mimic real-life scenarios, and the outcomes of the content-preservation evaluation have to be interpretable by potential users of these obfuscation tools. Motivated by recent work on cross-topic authorship identification and content preservation in summarization, we re-evaluate different authorship obfuscation techniques on detection evasion and content preservation. Furthermore, we propose a new information-theoretic measure to characterize the misattribution harm that can be caused by detection evasion. Our results reveal key weaknesses in state-of-the-art obfuscation techniques and a surprisingly competitive effectiveness from a back-translation baseline in all evaluation aspects.

A Multifaceted Framework to Evaluate Evasion, Content Preservation, and Misattribution in Authorship Obfuscation Techniques

Understanding what constitutes safe text is an important issue in natural language processing and can often prevent the deployment of models deemed harmful and unsafe. One such type of safety that has been scarcely studied is commonsense physical safety, i.e. text that is not explicitly violent and requires additional commonsense knowledge to comprehend that it leads to physical harm. We create the first benchmark dataset, SafeText, comprising real-life scenarios with paired safe and physically unsafe pieces of advice. We utilize SafeText to empirically study commonsense physical safety across various models designed for text generation and commonsense reasoning tasks. We find that state-of-the-art large language models are susceptible to the generation of unsafe text and have difficulty rejecting unsafe advice. As a result, we argue for further studies of safety and the assessment of commonsense physical safety in models before release.

SafeText: A Benchmark for Exploring Physical Safety in Language Models

This paper studies the use of language models as a source of synthetic unlabeled text for NLP. We formulate a general framework called ``generate, annotate, and learn (GAL)'' to take advantage of synthetic text within knowledge distillation, self-training, and few-shot learning applications. To generate high-quality task-specific text, we either fine-tune LMs on inputs from the task of interest, or prompt large LMs with few examples. We use the best available classifier to annotate synthetic text with soft pseudo labels for knowledge distillation and self-training, and use LMs to obtain hard labels for few-shot learning. We train new supervised models on the combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data, which results in significant gains across several applications. We investigate key components of GAL and present theoretical and empirical arguments against the use of class-conditional LMs to generate synthetic labeled text instead of unlabeled text. GAL achieves new state-of-the-art knowledge distillation results for 6-layer transformers on the GLUE leaderboard.

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