Counterfactual reasoning requires predicting how alternative events, contrary to what actually happened, might have resulted in different outcomes. Despite being considered a necessary component of AI-complete systems, few resources have been developed for evaluating counterfactual reasoning in narratives.
In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Story Rewriting: given an original story and an intervening counterfactual event, the task is to minimally revise the story to make it compatible with the given counterfactual event. Solving this task will require deep understanding of causal narrative chains and counterfactual invariance, and integration of such story reasoning capabilities into conditional language generation models.
We present TimeTravel, a new dataset of 29,849 counterfactual rewritings, each with the original story, a counterfactual event, and human-generated revision of the original story compatible with the counterfactual event. Additionally, we include 80,115 counterfactual "branches" without a rewritten storyline to support future work on semi- or un-supervised approaches to counterfactual story rewriting.
Finally, we evaluate the counterfactual rewriting capacities of several competitive baselines based on pretrained language models, and assess whether common overlap and model-based automatic metrics for text generation correlate well with human scores for counterfactual rewriting.
Multi-hop QA requires reasoning over multiple supporting facts to answer the question. However, the existing QA models always rely on shortcuts, e.g., providing the true answer by only one fact, rather than multi-hop reasoning, which is referred as $\textit{disconnected reasoning}$ problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel counterfactual multihop QA, a causal-effect approach that enables to reduce the disconnected reasoning. It builds upon explicitly modeling of causality: 1) the direct causal effects of disconnected reasoning and 2) the causal effect of true multi-hop reasoning fro…
Research Training Group AIPHES（AIPHES研究培训小组）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）
Despite recent successes of large pre-trained language models in solving reasoning tasks, their inference capabilities remain opaque. We posit that such models can be made more interpretable by explicitly generating interim inference rules, and using them to guide the generation of task-specific textual outputs. In this paper we present COINS, a recursive inference framework that i) iteratively reads context sentences, ii) dynamically generates contextualized inference rules, encodes them, and iii) uses them to guide task-specific output generation. We apply COINS to a Narrative Story Completi…
Generating Storytelling Images with Rich Chains-of-Reasoning
X-LANCE Lab, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China（X-LANCE实验室，计算机科学学院，上海交通大学，中国）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, China（上海人工智能实验室，中国）；East China University of Technology, China（东华大学，中国）；University of Texas at Arlington, USA（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校，美国）
Institute for Applied Informatics at Leipzig University (InfAI)（莱比锡大学应用信息学研究所（InfAI））
We introduce the CRASS (counterfactual reasoning assessment) data set and benchmark utilizing questionized counterfactual conditionals as a novel and powerful tool to evaluate large language models. We present the data set design and benchmark that supports scoring against a crowd-validated human baseline. We test six state-of-the-art models against our benchmark. Our results show that it poses a valid challenge for these models and opens up considerable room for their improvement.
Social Story Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Narrative Intent and Reception
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；University of Michigan-Flint（密歇根大学弗林特分校）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Recent text generation models are easy to generate relevant and fluent text for the given text, while lack of causal reasoning ability when we change some parts of the given text. Counterfactual story rewriting is a recently proposed task to test the causal reasoning ability for text generation models, which requires a model to predict the corresponding story ending when the condition is modified to a counterfactual one. Previous works have shown that the traditional sequence-to-sequence model cannot well handle this problem, as it often captures some spurious correlations between the original…
University of California Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Meta；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Current pre-trained language models have enabled remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains difficult to distinguish effects of statistical correlation from more systematic logical reasoning grounded on understanding of the real world. In this paper we tease these factors apart by leveraging counterfactual conditionals, which force language models to predict unusual consequences based on hypothetical propositions. We introduce a set of tests drawn from psycholinguistic experiments, as well as larger-scale controlled datasets, to probe counterfactual predictions from a variety …
As humans, we can modify our assumptions about a scene by imagining alternative objects or concepts in our minds. For example, we can easily anticipate the implications of the sun being overcast by rain clouds (e.g., the street will get wet) and accordingly prepare for that. In this paper, we introduce a new task/dataset called Commonsense Reasoning for Counterfactual Scene Imagination (CoSIm) which is designed to evaluate the ability of AI systems to reason about scene change imagination. In this task/dataset, models are given an image and an initial question-response pair about the image. Ne…
Improving Clinical Diagnosis with Counterfactual Multi-Agent Reasoning
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Jacobi Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine（雅各布医疗中心，阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦学院）；Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列医疗中心急诊科）；Leaning machines（Leanings machines）
Creating what-if stories requires reasoning about prior statements and possible outcomes of the changed conditions. One can easily generate coherent endings under new conditions, but it would be challenging for current systems to do it with minimal changes to the original story. Therefore, one major challenge is the trade-off between generating a logical story and rewriting with minimal-edits. In this paper, we propose EDUCAT, an editing-based unsupervised approach for counterfactual story rewriting. EDUCAT includes a target position detection strategy based on estimating causal effects of the…
Automated story plot generation is the task of generating a coherent sequence of plot events. Causal relations between plot events are believed to increase the perception of story and plot coherence. In this work, we introduce the concept of soft causal relations as causal relations inferred from commonsense reasoning. We demonstrate C2PO, an approach to narrative generation that operationalizes this concept through Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. Using human-participant protocols, we evaluate our system against baseline systems with different commonsense reasoning reasoning and inductive b…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking, e.g., to scrutinize for the hard testing samples. Inspired by this, we propose a Counterfactual Reasoning Model, which mimics the counterfactual thinking by learning from few counterfactual samples. In particular, we devise a generation module to generate representative counterfactual samples fo…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science Technology（国立先进工业科学技术研究院）
Existing automatic story evaluation methods place a premium on story lexical level coherence, deviating from human preference. We go beyond this limitation by considering a novel \textbf{Story} \textbf{E}valuation method that mimics human preference when judging a story, namely \textbf{StoryER}, which consists of three sub-tasks: \textbf{R}anking, \textbf{R}ating and \textbf{R}easoning. Given either a machine-generated or a human-written story, StoryER requires the machine to output 1) a preference score that corresponds to human preference, 2) specific ratings and their corresponding confiden…
Shandong University（山东大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Existing studies on multimodal sentiment analysis heavily rely on textual modality and unavoidably induce the spurious correlations between textual words and sentiment labels. This greatly hinders the model generalization ability. To address this problem, we define the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal sentiment analysis. This task aims to estimate and mitigate the bad effect of textual modality for strong OOD generalization. To this end, we embrace causal inference, which inspects the causal relationships via a causal graph. From the graph, we find that the spurious correlations ar…
In this paper, we describe an approach for modelling causal reasoning in natural language by detecting counterfactuals in text using multi-head self-attention weights. We use pre-trained transformer models to extract contextual embeddings and self-attention weights from the text. We show the use of convolutional layers to extract task-specific features from these self-attention weights. Further, we describe a fine-tuning approach with a common base model for knowledge sharing between the two closely related sub-tasks for counterfactual detection. We analyze and compare the performance of vario…
Australian AI Institute（澳大利亚人工智能研究所）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Image-guided story ending generation (IgSEG) is to generate a story ending based on given story plots and ending image. Existing methods focus on cross-modal feature fusion but overlook reasoning and mining implicit information from story plots and ending image. To tackle this drawback, we propose a multimodal event transformer, an event-based reasoning framework for IgSEG. Specifically, we construct visual and semantic event graphs from story plots and ending image, and leverage event-based reasoning to reason and mine implicit information in a single modality. Next, we connect visual and sem…
