Commonsense question answering (CQA) aims to test if models can answer questions regarding commonsense knowledge that everyone knows. Prior works that incorporate external knowledge bases have shown promising results, but knowledge bases are expensive to construct and are often limited to a fixed set of relations. In this paper, we instead focus on better utilizing the \textit{implicit knowledge} stored in pre-trained language models. While researchers have found that the knowledge embedded in pre-trained language models can be extracted by having them fill in the blanks of carefully designed prompts for relation extraction and text classification, it remains unclear if we can adopt this paradigm in CQA where the inputs and outputs take much more flexible forms. To this end, we investigate four translation methods that can translate natural questions into cloze-style sentences to better solicit commonsense knowledge from language models, including a syntactic-based model, an unsupervised neural model, and two supervised neural models. In addition, to combine the different translation methods, we propose to encourage consistency among model predictions on different translated questions with unlabeled data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on three CQA datasets in zero-shot settings. We show that our methods are complementary to a knowledge base improved model, and combining them can lead to state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Analyses also reveal distinct characteristics of the different cloze translation methods and provide insights on why combining them can lead to great improvements.
We present a novel deep learning architecture to address the cloze-style question answering task. Existing approaches employ reading mechanisms that do not fully exploit the interdependency between the document and the query. In this paper, we propose a novel \emph{dependent gated reading} bidirectional GRU network (DGR) to efficiently model the relationship between the document and the query during encoding and decision making. Our evaluation shows that DGR obtains highly competitive performance on well-known machine comprehension benchmarks such as the Children's Book Test (CBT-NE and CBT-CN…
Microsoft Research Asia(微软亚洲研究院);Sun Yat-Sen University(中山大学)
Although neural network approaches achieve remarkable success on a variety of NLP tasks, many of them struggle to answer questions that require commonsense knowledge. We believe the main reason is the lack of commonsense \mbox{connections} between concepts. To remedy this, we provide a simple and effective method that leverages external commonsense knowledge base such as ConceptNet. We pre-train direct and indirect relational functions between concepts, and show that these pre-trained functions could be easily added to existing neural network models. Results show that incorporating commonsense…
Microsoft Cognitive Services Research Group(微软认知服务研究组)
Commonsense question answering (QA) requires a model to grasp commonsense and factual knowledge to answer questions about world events. Many prior methods couple language modeling with knowledge graphs (KG). However, although a KG contains rich structural information, it lacks the context to provide a more precise understanding of the concepts. This creates a gap when fusing knowledge graphs into language modeling, especially when there is insufficient labeled data. Thus, we propose to employ external entity descriptions to provide contextual information for knowledge understanding. We retriev…
Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学)
A fundamental ability of humans is to utilize commonsense knowledge in language understanding and question answering. In recent years, many knowledge-enhanced Commonsense Question Answering (CQA) approaches have been proposed. However, it remains unclear: (1) How far can we get by exploiting external knowledge for CQA? (2) How much potential of knowledge has been exploited in current CQA models? (3) Which are the most promising directions for future CQA? To answer these questions, we benchmark knowledge-enhanced CQA by conducting extensive experiments on multiple standard CQA datasets using a …
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence(艾伦人工智能研究所);Stanford University(斯坦福大学);University of Washington(华盛顿大学)
Understanding narratives requires reasoning about implicit world knowledge related to the causes, effects, and states of situations described in text. At the core of this challenge is how to access contextually relevant knowledge on demand and reason over it. In this paper, we present initial studies toward zero-shot commonsense question answering by formulating the task as inference over dynamically generated commonsense knowledge graphs. In contrast to previous studies for knowledge integration that rely on retrieval of existing knowledge from static knowledge graphs, our study requires comm…
Columbia University(哥伦比亚大学);JD AI Research(京东人工智能研究);Georgia Institute of Technology(佐治亚理工学院)
Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have led to great success on various commonsense question answering (QA) tasks in an end-to-end fashion. However, little attention has been paid to what commonsense knowledge is needed to deeply characterize these QA tasks. In this work, we proposed to categorize the semantics needed for these tasks using the SocialIQA as an example. Building upon our labeled social knowledge categories dataset on top of SocialIQA, we further train neural QA models to incorporate such social knowledge categories and relation information from a knowledge base. Unlike pre…
The University of Queensland(昆士兰大学);Monash University(蒙纳士大学);The University of New South Wales(新南威尔士大学)
Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions requires context-dependent on-demand systems to infer such underlying information. However, current approaches in this realm lack the ability to perform commonsense reasoning upon facing an unseen situation, mostly due to incapability of identifying a diverse range of implicit social relations. Hence …
Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学);University of California(加利福尼亚大学);Duke University(杜克大学);Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学深圳校区)
Commonsense question answering requires reasoning about everyday situations and causes and effects implicit in context. Typically, existing approaches first retrieve external evidence and then perform commonsense reasoning using these evidence. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised Bidirectional Encoder Representation Learning of Commonsense (elBERto) framework, which is compatible with off-the-shelf QA model architectures. The framework comprises five self-supervised tasks to force the model to fully exploit the additional training signals from contexts containing rich commonsense. The …
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);Bosch Research and Technology Center(博世研究与技术中心)
Non-extractive commonsense QA remains a challenging AI task, as it requires systems to reason about, synthesize, and gather disparate pieces of information, in order to generate responses to queries. Recent approaches on such tasks show increased performance, only when models are either pre-trained with additional information or when domain-specific heuristics are used, without any special consideration regarding the knowledge resource type. In this paper, we perform a survey of recent commonsense QA methods and we provide a systematic analysis of popular knowledge resources and knowledge-inte…
Gotta: Generative Few-shot Question Answering by Prompt-based Cloze Data Augmentation
University of California, Los Angeles(加州大学洛杉矶分校);University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校);Univ of Technology Sydney(悉尼科技大学);Amazon Search(亚马逊搜索)
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院信息工程研究所);School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院)
It is prevalent to utilize external knowledge to help machine answer questions that need background commonsense, which faces a problem that unlimited knowledge will transmit noisy and misleading information. Towards the issue of introducing related knowledge, we propose a semantic-driven knowledge-aware QA framework, which controls the knowledge injection in a coarse-to-careful fashion. We devise a tailoring strategy to filter extracted knowledge under monitoring of the coarse semantic of question on the knowledge extraction stage. And we develop a semantic-aware knowledge fetching module that…
Information Sciences Institute(信息科学研究所);University of Southern California(南加州大学)
Language models (LMs) show state of the art performance for common sense (CS) question answering, but whether this ability implies a human-level mastery of CS remains an open question. Understanding the limitations and strengths of LMs can help researchers improve these models, potentially by developing novel ways of integrating external CS knowledge. We devise a series of tests and measurements to systematically quantify their performance on different aspects of CS. We propose the use of cloze testing combined with word embeddings to measure the LM's robustness and confidence. Our results sho…
Facebook AI Research(脸书人工智能研究院);University College London(伦敦大学学院)
Obtaining training data for Question Answering (QA) is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and existing QA datasets are only available for limited domains and languages. In this work, we explore to what extent high quality training data is actually required for Extractive QA, and investigate the possibility of unsupervised Extractive QA. We approach this problem by first learning to generate context, question and answer triples in an unsupervised manner, which we then use to synthesize Extractive QA training data automatically. To generate such triples, we first sample random context paragr…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(韩国科学技术院)
Many contextualized word representations are now learned by intricate neural network models, such as masked neural language models (MNLMs) which are made up of huge neural network structures and trained to restore the masked text. Such representations demonstrate superhuman performance in some reading comprehension (RC) tasks which extract a proper answer in the context given a question. However, identifying the detailed knowledge trained in MNLMs is challenging owing to numerous and intermingled model parameters. This paper provides new insights and empirical analyses on commonsense knowledge…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence(艾伦人工智能研究所);Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington(华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院)
Natural language understanding involves reading between the lines with implicit background knowledge. Current systems either rely on pre-trained language models as the sole implicit source of world knowledge, or resort to external knowledge bases (KBs) to incorporate additional relevant knowledge. We propose an unsupervised framework based on self-talk as a novel alternative to multiple-choice commonsense tasks. Inspired by inquiry-based discovery learning (Bruner, 1961), our approach inquires language models with a number of information seeking questions such as "$\textit{what is the definiti…
Tsinghua University(清华大学);Institute for Artificial Intelligence(人工智能研究院);Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology(北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心);Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications(北京邮电大学)
Unsupervised commonsense question answering is appealing since it does not rely on any labeled task data. Among existing work, a popular solution is to use pre-trained language models to score candidate choices directly conditioned on the question or context. However, such scores from language models can be easily affected by irrelevant factors, such as word frequencies, sentence structures, etc. These distracting factors may not only mislead the model to choose a wrong answer but also make it oversensitive to lexical perturbations in candidate answers. In this paper, we present a novel SEmant…
Commonsense reasoning tasks such as commonsense knowledge graph completion and commonsense question answering require powerful representation learning. In this paper, we propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by MICO, a Multi-alternative contrastve learning framework on COmmonsense knowledge graphs (MICO). MICO generates the commonsense knowledge representation by contextual interaction between entity nodes and relations with multi-alternative contrastive learning. In MICO, the head and tail entities in an $(h,r,t)$ knowledge triple are converted to two relation-aware sequence p…
HKUST(香港科技大学);UPenn(宾夕法尼亚大学);CUHK(香港中文大学);AI2(艾伦人工智能研究所);University of Washington(华盛顿大学);Bar Ilan University(巴伊兰大学)
Recently, the community has achieved substantial progress on many commonsense reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear what is learned from the training process: the knowledge, inference capability, or both? We argue that due to the large scale of commonsense knowledge, it is infeasible to annotate a large enough training set for each task to cover all commonsense for learning. Thus we should separate the commonsense knowledge acquisition and inference over commonsense knowledge as two separate tasks. In this work, we focus on investigating models' commonsense inference capabilities …
School of Computer Science(计算机科学学院);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
Recent success of deep learning models for the task of extractive Question Answering (QA) is hinged on the availability of large annotated corpora. However, large domain specific annotated corpora are limited and expensive to construct. In this work, we envision a system where the end user specifies a set of base documents and only a few labelled examples. Our system exploits the document structure to create cloze-style questions from these base documents; pre-trains a powerful neural network on the cloze style questions; and further fine-tunes the model on the labeled examples. We evaluate ou…
Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval(社会计算与信息检索研究中心);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学)
Unsupervised commonsense question answering requires mining effective commonsense knowledge without the rely on the labeled task data. Previous methods typically retrieved from traditional knowledge bases or used pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to generate fixed types of knowledge, which have poor generalization ability. In this paper, we aim to address the above limitation by leveraging the implicit knowledge stored in PrLMs and propose a two-stage prompt-based unsupervised commonsense question answering framework (TSGP). Specifically, we first use knowledge generation prompts to generate…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院信息工程研究所);School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院);Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学);Peking University(北京大学);Microsoft Corporation(微软公司);Microsoft Research Asia(微软亚洲研究院)
Commonsense question answering aims to answer questions which require background knowledge that is not explicitly expressed in the question. The key challenge is how to obtain evidence from external knowledge and make predictions based on the evidence. Recent works either learn to generate evidence from human-annotated evidence which is expensive to collect, or extract evidence from either structured or unstructured knowledge bases which fails to take advantages of both sources. In this work, we propose to automatically extract evidence from heterogeneous knowledge sources, and answer question…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics(马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所)
ASCENT is a fully automated methodology for extracting and consolidating commonsense assertions from web contents (Nguyen et al., WWW 2021). It advances traditional triple-based commonsense knowledge representation by capturing semantic facets like locations and purposes, and composite concepts, i.e., subgroups and related aspects of subjects. In this demo, we present a web portal that allows users to understand its construction process, explore its content, and observe its impact in the use case of question answering. The demo website and an introductory video are both available online.
Research Training Group AIPHES(AIPHES研究培训小组);Department of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University(海德堡大学计算语言学系);Heidelberg, Germany(德国海德堡)
We introduce a neural reading comprehension model that integrates external commonsense knowledge, encoded as a key-value memory, in a cloze-style setting. Instead of relying only on document-to-question interaction or discrete features as in prior work, our model attends to relevant external knowledge and combines this knowledge with the context representation before inferring the answer. This allows the model to attract and imply knowledge from an external knowledge source that is not explicitly stated in the text, but that is relevant for inferring the answer. Our model improves results over…
Tel-Aviv University(特拉维夫大学);Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence(艾伦人工智能研究所)
When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. Recent work has focused primarily on answering questions given some relevant document or context, and required very little general background. To investigate question answering with prior knowledge, we present CommonsenseQA: a challenging new dataset for commonsense question answering. To capture common sense beyond associations, we extract from ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017) multiple target concepts that have the same semantic relation to a single source concept. Crowd-workers …
Recently several datasets have been proposed to encourage research in Question Answering domains where commonsense knowledge is expected to play an important role. Recent language models such as ROBERTA, BERT and GPT that have been pre-trained on Wikipedia articles and books have shown reasonable performance with little fine-tuning on several such Multiple Choice Question-Answering (MCQ) datasets. Our goal in this work is to develop methods to incorporate additional (commonsense) knowledge into language model-based approaches for better question-answering in such domains. In this work, we firs…
Bosch Research(博世研究院);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California(南加州大学维特比工程学院信息科学研究所);Michigan State University(密歇根州立大学)
This chapter illustrates how suitable neuro-symbolic models for language understanding can enable domain generalizability and robustness in downstream tasks. Different methods for integrating neural language models and knowledge graphs are discussed. The situations in which this combination is most appropriate are characterized, including quantitative evaluation and qualitative error analysis on a variety of commonsense question answering benchmark datasets.
Review comprehension has played an increasingly important role in improving the quality of online services and products and commonsense knowledge can further enhance review comprehension. However, existing general-purpose commonsense knowledge bases lack sufficient coverage and precision to meaningfully improve the comprehension of domain-specific reviews. In this paper, we introduce xSense, an effective system for review comprehension using domain-specific commonsense knowledge bases (xSense KBs). We show that xSense KBs can be constructed inexpensively and present a knowledge distillation me…
Without labeled question-answer pairs for necessary training, unsupervised commonsense question-answering (QA) appears to be extremely challenging due to its indispensable unique prerequisite on commonsense source like knowledge bases (KBs), which are usually highly resource consuming in construction. Recently pre-trained language models (PLMs) show effectiveness as an alternative for commonsense clues when they play a role of knowledge generator. However, existing work either relies on large-scale in-domain or out-of-domain labeled data, or fails to generate knowledge of high quality in a gen…
University of Southern California(南加州大学);Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California(南加州大学信息科学研究所);University of California, Los Angeles(加州大学洛杉矶分校)
Commonsense question answering (QA) requires background knowledge which is not explicitly stated in a given context. Prior works use commonsense knowledge graphs (KGs) to obtain this knowledge for reasoning. However, relying entirely on these KGs may not suffice, considering their limited coverage and the contextual dependence of their knowledge. In this paper, we augment a general commonsense QA framework with a knowledgeable path generator. By extrapolating over existing paths in a KG with a state-of-the-art language model, our generator learns to connect a pair of entities in text with a dy…
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);University of Southern California(南加州大学);Bosch Research(博世研究中心)
Recent developments in pre-trained neural language modeling have led to leaps in accuracy on commonsense question-answering benchmarks. However, there is increasing concern that models overfit to specific tasks, without learning to utilize external knowledge or perform general semantic reasoning. In contrast, zero-shot evaluations have shown promise as a more robust measure of a model's general reasoning abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for zero-shot question answering across commonsense tasks. Guided by a set of hypotheses, the framework studies how to tra…
In order to facilitate natural language understanding, the key is to engage commonsense or background knowledge. However, how to engage commonsense effectively in question answering systems is still under exploration in both research academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel question-answering method by integrating multiple knowledge sources, i.e. ConceptNet, Wikipedia, and the Cambridge Dictionary, to boost the performance. More concretely, we first introduce a novel graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module, which iteratively retrieves concepts and entities related to t…
Recently, end-to-end trained models for multiple-choice commonsense question answering (QA) have delivered promising results. However, such question-answering systems cannot be directly applied in real-world scenarios where answer candidates are not provided. Hence, a new benchmark challenge set for open-ended commonsense reasoning (OpenCSR) has been recently released, which contains natural science questions without any predefined choices. On the OpenCSR challenge set, many questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning and have a large decision space, reflecting the difficult nature of this …
University of Washington(华盛顿大学);Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence(艾伦人工智能研究所)
Knowledge underpins reasoning. Recent research demonstrates that when relevant knowledge is provided as additional context to commonsense question answering (QA), it can substantially enhance the performance even on top of state-of-the-art. The fundamental challenge is where and how to find such knowledge that is high quality and on point with respect to the question; knowledge retrieved from knowledge bases are incomplete and knowledge generated from language models are inconsistent. We present Rainier, or Reinforced Knowledge Introspector, that learns to generate contextually relevant knowle…
Seoul National University(首尔国立大学);Hanshin University(韩神大学)
Recently, pre-trained language representation models such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) have been performing well in commonsense question answering (CSQA). However, there is a problem that the models do not directly use explicit information of knowledge sources existing outside. To augment this, additional methods such as knowledge-aware graph network (KagNet) and multi-hop graph relation network (MHGRN) have been proposed. In this study, we propose to use the latest pre-trained language model a lite bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (A…
Video understanding has achieved great success in representation learning, such as video caption, video object grounding, and video descriptive question-answer. However, current methods still struggle on video reasoning, including evidence reasoning and commonsense reasoning. To facilitate deeper video understanding towards video reasoning, we present the task of Causal-VidQA, which includes four types of questions ranging from scene description (description) to evidence reasoning (explanation) and commonsense reasoning (prediction and counterfactual). For commonsense reasoning, we set up a tw…
Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval(社会计算与信息检索研究中心);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学)
Existing KG-augmented models for commonsense question answering primarily focus on designing elaborate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model knowledge graphs (KGs). However, they ignore (i) the effectively fusing and reasoning over question context representations and the KG representations, and (ii) automatically selecting relevant nodes from the noisy KGs during reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel model, JointLK, which solves the above limitations through the joint reasoning of LM and GNN and the dynamic KGs pruning mechanism. Specifically, JointLK performs joint reasoning between L…
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学深圳校区);Tencent AI Lab(腾讯AI实验室)
When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. While recent works retrieve supporting facts/evidence from commonsense knowledge bases to supply additional information to each question, there is still ample opportunity to advance it on the quality of the evidence. It is crucial since the quality of the evidence is the key to answering commonsense questions, and even determines the upper bound on the QA systems performance. In this paper, we propose a recursive erasure memory network (REM-Net) to cope with the quality improveme…
Télécom Paris(巴黎电信学院);Max Planck Institute for Informatics(马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所);University of Aberdeen(阿伯丁大学)
Commonsense knowledge about object properties, human behavior and general concepts is crucial for robust AI applications. However, automatic acquisition of this knowledge is challenging because of sparseness and bias in online sources. This paper presents Quasimodo, a methodology and tool suite for distilling commonsense properties from non-standard web sources. We devise novel ways of tapping into search-engine query logs and QA forums, and combining the resulting candidate assertions with statistical cues from encyclopedias, books and image tags in a corroboration step. Unlike prior work on …
Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of figurative language, and counterfactual reasoning skills, which are all important abilities for advanced natural language understanding (NLU). However, there are currently no dedicated datasets aiming to test these abilities. Herein, we present RiddleSense, a new multiple-choice question answering task, which comes with the first large dataset (5.7k examples) for …
Reading comprehension QA tasks have seen a recent surge in popularity, yet most works have focused on fact-finding extractive QA. We instead focus on a more challenging multi-hop generative task (NarrativeQA), which requires the model to reason, gather, and synthesize disjoint pieces of information within the context to generate an answer. This type of multi-step reasoning also often requires understanding implicit relations, which humans resolve via external, background commonsense knowledge. We first present a strong generative baseline that uses a multi-attention mechanism to perform multip…
Recent Deep Learning (DL) models have succeeded in achieving human-level accuracy on various natural language tasks such as question-answering, natural language inference (NLI), and textual entailment. These tasks not only require the contextual knowledge but also the reasoning abilities to be solved efficiently. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised question-answering based approach for a similar task, fact-checking. We transform the FEVER dataset into a Cloze-task by masking named entities provided in the claims. To predict the answer token, we utilize pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder R…
This work investigates the challenge of learning and reasoning for Commonsense Question Answering given an external source of knowledge in the form of a knowledge graph (KG). We propose a novel graph neural network architecture, called Dynamic Relevance Graph Network (DRGN). DRGN operates on a given KG subgraph based on the question and answers entities and uses the relevance scores between the nodes to establish new edges dynamically for learning node representations in the graph network. This explicit usage of relevance as graph edges has the following advantages, a) the model can exploit th…
Facebook AI Research(脸书人工智能研究院);University College London(伦敦大学学院)
When pre-trained on large unsupervised textual corpora, language models are able to store and retrieve factual knowledge to some extent, making it possible to use them directly for zero-shot cloze-style question answering. However, storing factual knowledge in a fixed number of weights of a language model clearly has limitations. Previous approaches have successfully provided access to information outside the model weights using supervised architectures that combine an information retrieval system with a machine reading component. In this paper, we go a step further and integrate information f…
A common limitation of diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP models is that they may only detect stereotypic associations that are pre-specified by the designer of the test. Since enumerating all possible problematic associations is infeasible, it is likely these tests fail to detect biases that are present in a model but not pre-specified by the designer. To address this limitation, we propose SODAPOP (SOcial bias Discovery from Answers about PeOPle) in social commonsense question-answering. Our pipeline generates modified instances from the Social IQa dataset (Sap et al., 2019)…
Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since gold evidence is not always available, and QA is fundamentally different from IR. We show for the first time that it is possible to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. In this setting, evidence retrieval from all of Wikipedia is treated as a latent variable. Since this is impractical to learn fro…