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Abductive reasoning aims at inferring the most plausible explanation for observed events, which would play critical roles in various NLP applications, such as reading comprehension and question answering. To facilitate this task, a narrative text based abductive reasoning task $\alpha$NLI is proposed, together with explorations about building reasoning framework using pretrained language models. However, abundant event commonsense knowledge is not well exploited for this task. 
To fill this gap, we propose a variational autoencoder based model ege-RoBERTa, which employs a latent variable to capture the necessary commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. Experimental results show that through learning the external event graph knowledge, our approach outperforms the baseline methods on the $\alpha$NLI task.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning

abductive reasoning

event graph

language model

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ACL 2023

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poster

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Pre-trained language models (PrLMs) have demonstrated superior performance due to their strong ability to learn universal language representations from self-supervised pre-training. However, even with the help of the powerful PrLMs, it is still challenging to effectively capture task-related knowledge from dialogue texts which are enriched by correlations among speaker-aware utterances. In this work, we present SPIDER, Structural Pre-traIned DialoguE Reader, to capture dialogue exclusive features. To simulate the dialogue-like features, we propose two training objectives in addition to the original LM objectives: 1) utterance order restoration, which predicts the order of the permuted utterances in dialogue context; 2) sentence backbone regularization, which regularizes the model to improve the factual correctness of summarized subject-verb-object triplets. Experimental results on widely used dialogue benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the newly introduced self-supervised tasks.

Structural Pre-training for Dialogue Comprehension

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in natural language processing. Most of PLMs follow the default setting of architecture hyper-parameters (e.g., the hidden dimension is a quarter of the intermediate dimension in feed-forward sub-networks) in BERT. Few studies have been conducted to explore the design of architecture hyper-parameters in BERT, especially for the more efficient PLMs with tiny sizes, which are essential for practical deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we adopt the one-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to automatically search architecture hyper-parameters. Specifically, we carefully design the techniques of one-shot learning and the search space to provide an adaptive and efficient development way of tiny PLMs for various latency constraints. We name our method AutoTinyBERT and evaluate its effectiveness on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. The extensive experiments show that our method outperforms both the SOTA search-based baseline (NAS-BERT) and the SOTA distillation-based methods (such as DistilBERT, TinyBERT, MiniLM, and MobileBERT). In addition, based on the obtained architectures, we propose a more efficient development method that is even faster than the development of a single PLM. The source code and models will be publicly available upon publication.

AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models

Due to recent pretrained multilingual representation models, it has become feasible to exploit labeled data from one language to train a cross-lingual model that can then be applied to multiple new languages. In practice, however, we still face the problem of scarce labeled data, leading to subpar results. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy for better cross-lingual natural language inference by enriching the data to reflect more diversity in a semantically faithful way. To this end, we propose two methods of training a generative model to induce synthesized examples, and then leverage the resulting data using an adversarial training regimen for more robustness. In a series of detailed experiments, we show that this fruitful combination leads to substantial gains in cross-lingual inference.

Data Augmentation with Adversarial Training for Cross-Lingual NLI

Neural semantic parsers have obtained acceptable results in the context of parsing DRSs (Discourse Representation Structures). In particular models with character sequences as input showed remarkable performance for English. But how does this approach perform on languages with a different writing system, like Chinese, a language with a large vocabulary of characters? Does rule-based tokenisation of the input help, and which granularity is preferred: characters, or words? The results are promising. Even with DRSs based on English, good results for Chinese are obtained. Tokenisation offers a small advantage for English, but not for Chinese. Overall, characters are preferred as input, both for English and Chinese.

Input Representations for Parsing Discourse Representation Structures: Comparing English with Chinese

Training datasets for semantic parsing are typically small due to the higher expertise required for annotation than most other NLP tasks. As a result, models for this application usually need additional prior knowledge to be built into the architecture or algorithm. The increased dependency on human experts hinders automation and raises the development and maintenance costs in practice. This work investigates whether a generic transformer-based seq2seq model can achieve competitive performance with minimal code-generation-specific inductive bias design. By exploiting a relatively sizeable monolingual corpus of the target programming language, which is cheap to mine from the web, we achieved 81.03% exact match accuracy on Django and 32.57 BLEU score on CoNaLa. Both are SOTA to the best of our knowledge. This positive evidence highlights a potentially easier path toward building accurate semantic parsers in practice.

Code Generation from Natural Language with Less Prior Knowledge and More Monolingual Data

As high-quality labeled data is scarce, unsupervised sentence representation learning has attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose a new framework with a two-branch Siamese Network which maximizes the similarity between two augmented views of each sentence. Specifically, given one augmented view of the input sentence, the online network branch is trained by predicting the representation yielded by the target network of the same sentence under another augmented view. Meanwhile, the target network branch is bootstrapped with a moving average of the online network. The proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on semantic textual similarity (STS) and classification tasks. It can be adopted as a post-training procedure to boost the performance of the supervised methods. We further extend our method for learning multilingual sentence representations and demonstrate its effectiveness on cross-lingual STS tasks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/yanzhangnlp/BSL}.

Bootstrapped Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning

Neural models for natural language generation are known to produce output which is boring, inconsistent and inappropriate. In this talk, I will argue that one way to alleviate these problems is via `grounding’. That is, encoding external knowledge which provides additional information at decoding time. I will illustrate this argument for 4 different tasks: data-to-text generation, document summarisation, visual dialogue and open-domain dialogue systems.

Grounded Neural Generation

A key challenge for Artificial Intelligence is to design intelligent agents that can reason with heterogeneous representations. In this talk, I will describe our recent work on teaching machines to reason in semi-structured tables and unstructured text data, and answer multi-hop questions. More specifically, I will introduce:

(1) HybridQA, a multi-hop question answering framework on tables and text;

(2) OTT-QA, an extend of the HybridQA dataset into the more challenging open domain setting.

Question Answering over Text and Tables

Narrative generation is an open-ended NLP task in which a model generates a story given a prompt. The task is similar to neural response generation for chatbots; however, innovations in response generation are often not applied to narrative generation, despite the similarity between these tasks. We aim to bridge this gap by applying and evaluating advances in decoding methods for neural response generation to neural narrative generation. In particular, we employ GPT-2 and perform ablations across nucleus sampling thresholds and diverse decoding hyperparameters---specifically, maximum mutual information---analyzing results over multiple criteria with automatic and human evaluation. We find that (1) nucleus sampling is generally best with thresholds between 0.7 and 0.9; (2) a maximum mutual information objective can improve the quality of generated stories; and (3) established automatic metrics do not correlate well with human judgments of narrative quality on any qualitative metric.

Decoding Methods for Neural Narrative Generation

Sentence-level text simplification is evaluated using both automated metrics and human evaluation. For automatic evaluation, a combination of metrics is usually employed to evaluate different aspects of the simplification. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) is one metric that has been regularly used to measure the readability of system output. In this paper, we argue that FKGL should not be used to evaluate text simplification systems. We provide experimental analyses on recent system output showing that the FKGL score can easily be manipulated to improve the score dramatically with only a minor impact on other automated metrics (BLEU and SARI). Instead of using FKGL, we suggest that the component statistics, along with others, be used for posthoc analysis to understand system behavior.

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Structural Pre-training for Dialogue Comprehension

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Abductive Commonsense Reasoning Exploiting Mutually Exclusive Explanations

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