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Answering questions about why characters perform certain actions is central to understanding and reasoning about narratives. Despite recent progress in QA, it is not clear if existing models have the ability to answer &quot;why&#39;&#39; questions that may require commonsense knowledge external to the input narrative. In this work, we introduce TellMeWhy, a new crowd-sourced dataset that consists of more than 30k questions and free-form answers concerning why characters in short narratives perform the actions described. For a third of this dataset, the answers are not present within the narrative. Given the limitations of automated evaluation for this task, we also present a systematized human evaluation interface for this dataset. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models show that they are far below human performance on answering such questions. They are especially worse on questions whose answers are external to the narrative, thus providing a challenge for future QA and narrative understanding research.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

TellMeWhy: A Dataset for Answering Why-Questions in Narratives

tellmewhy

causal knowledge

question answering

dataset

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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).

Answering questions about why characters perform certain actions is central to understanding and reasoning about narratives. Despite recent progress in QA, it is not clear if existing models have the ability to answer "why'' questions that may require commonsense knowledge external to the input narrative. In this work, we introduce TellMeWhy, a new crowd-sourced dataset that consists of more than 30k questions and free-form answers concerning why characters in short narratives perform the actions described. For a third of this dataset, the answers are not present within the narrative. Given the limitations of automated evaluation for this task, we also present a systematized human evaluation interface for this dataset. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models show that they are far below human performance on answering such questions. They are especially worse on questions whose answers are external to the narrative, thus providing a challenge for future QA and narrative understanding research.

technical paper

Neural network architectures in natural language processing often use attention mechanisms to produce probability distributions over input token representations. Attention has empirically been demonstrated to improve performance in various tasks, while its weights have been extensively used as explanations for model predictions. Recent studies (Jain and Wallace, 2019; Serrano and Smith, 2019; Wiegreffe and Pinter, 2019) have showed that it cannot generally be considered as a faithful explanation (Jacovi and Goldberg, 2020) across encoders and tasks. In this paper, we seek to improve the faithfulness of attention-based explanations for text classification. We achieve this by proposing a new family of Task-Scaling (TaSc) mechanisms that learn task-specific non-contextualised information to scale the original attention weights. Evaluation tests for explanation faithfulness, show that the three proposed variants of TaSc improve attention-based explanations across two attention mechanisms, five encoders and five text classification datasets without sacrificing predictive performance. Finally, we demonstrate that TaSc consistently provides more faithful attention-based explanations compared to three widely-used interpretability techniques.

Improving the Faithfulness of Attention-based Explanations with Task-specific Information for Text Classification

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale image-text pairs has achieved huge success for the cross-modal downstream tasks. The most existing pre-training methods mainly adopt a two-step training procedure, which firstly employs a pre-trained object detector to extract region-based visual features, then concatenates the image representation and text embedding as the input of Transformer to train. However, these methods face problems of using task-specific visual representation of the specific object detector for generic cross-modal understanding, and the computation inefficiency of two-stage pipeline.

In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end vision-language pre-trained model for both V+L understanding and generation, namely E2E-VLP, where we build a unified Transformer framework to jointly learn visual representation, and semantic alignments between image and text. We incorporate the tasks of object detection and image captioning into pre-training with a unified Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for enhancing visual learning. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on well-established vision-language downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel VLP paradigm.

E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning

Despite the achievements of large-scale multimodal pre-training approaches, cross-modal retrieval, e.g., image-text retrieval, remains a challenging task. To bridge the semantic gap between the two modalities, previous studies mainly focus on word-region alignment at the object level, lacking the matching between the linguistic relation among the words and the visual relation among the regions. The neglect of such relation consistency impairs the contextualized representation of image-text pairs and hinders the model performance and the interpretability. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, Intra-modal Self-attention Distance (ISD), to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. In response, we present Inter-modal Alignment on Intra-modal Self-attentions (IAIS), a regularized training method to optimize the ISD and calibrate intra-modal self-attentions from the two modalities mutually via inter-modal alignment. The IAIS regularizer boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval

We present Knowledge Enhanced Multimodal BART (KM-BART), which is a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model capable of reasoning about commonsense knowledge from multimodal inputs of images and texts. We adapt the generative BART architecture (Lewis et al., 2020) to a multimodal model with visual and textual inputs. We further develop novel pretraining tasks to improve the model performance on the Visual Commonsense Generation (VCG) task. In particular, our pretraining task of Knowledge-based Commonsense Generation (KCG) boosts model performance on the VCG task by leveraging commonsense knowledge from a large language model pretrained on external commonsense knowledge graphs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a dedicated task for improving model performance on the VCG task. Experimental results show that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the VCG task (Park et al., 2020) by applying these novel pretraining tasks.

KM-BART: Knowledge Enhanced Multimodal BART for Visual Commonsense Generation

Document-level relation extraction has attracted much attention in recent years. It is usually formulated as a classification problem that predicts relations for all entity pairs in the document. However, previous works indiscriminately represent intra- and inter-sentential relations in the same way, confounding the different patterns for predicting them. Besides, they create a document graph and use paths between entities on the graph as clues for logical reasoning. However, not all entity pairs can be connected with a path and have the correct logical reasoning paths in their graph. Thus many cases of logical reasoning cannot be covered. This paper proposes an effective architecture, SIRE, to represent intra- and inter-sentential relations in different ways. We design a new and straightforward form of logical reasoning module that can cover more logical reasoning chains. Experiments on the public datasets show SIRE outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis shows that our predictions are reliable and explainable. Our code is available at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/SIRE.

SIRE: Separate Intra- and Inter-sentential Reasoning for Document-level Relation Extraction

We present a novel method for relation extraction (RE) from a single sentence, mapping the sentence and two given entities to a canonical fact in a knowledge graph (KG). Especially in this presumed sentential RE setting, the context of a single sentence is often sparse. This paper introduces the KGPool method to address this sparsity, dynamically expanding the context with additional facts from the KG. It learns the representation of these facts (entity alias, entity descriptions, etc.) using neural methods, supplementing the sentential context. Unlike existing methods that statically use all expanded facts, KGPool conditions this expansion on the sentence. We study the efficacy of KGPool by evaluating it with different neural models and KGs (Wikidata and NYT Freebase). Our experimental evaluation on standard datasets shows that by feeding the KGPool representation into a Graph Neural Network, the overall method is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.

KGPool: Dynamic Knowledge Graph Context Selection for Relation Extraction

Structural syntax knowledge has been proven effective for semantic role labeling (SRL), while existing works mostly use only one singleton syntax, such as either syntactic dependency or constituency tree. In this paper, we explore the integration of heterogeneous syntactic representations for SRL. We first consider a TreeLSTM-based integration, collaboratively learning the phrasal boundaries from the constituency and the semantic relations from dependency. We further introduce a label-aware GCN solution for simultaneously modeling the syntactic edges and labels. Experimental results demonstrate that by effectively combining the heterogeneous syntactic representations, our methods yield task improvements on both span-based and dependency-based SRL. Also our system achieves new state-of-the-art SRL performances, meanwhile bringing explainable task improvements.

Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling

Paraphrase generation is an important but challenging natural language generation problem. In this work, we propose a new Identification-then-Aggregation (IA) framework to tackle this task. 
In the identification step, the input tokens are sorted into two groups by a novel Primary/Secondary Identification (PSI) algorithm. In the aggregation step, these groups are separately encoded, before being aggregated by a custom designed decoder, which autoregressively generates the paraphrased sentence. In extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our model outperforms previous studies by a notable margin. We also show that the proposed approach can generate paraphrases in an interpretable and controllable way.

Keep the Primary, Rewrite the Secondary: A Two-Stage Approach for Paraphrase Generation

The performance of state-of-the-art neural rankers can deteriorate substantially when exposed to noisy inputs or applied to a new domain. In this paper, we present a novel method for fine-tuning neural rankers that can significantly improve their robustness to out-of-domain data and query perturbations. Specifically, a contrastive loss that compares data points in the representation space is combined with the standard ranking loss during fine-tuning. We use relevance labels to denote similar/dissimilar pairs, which allows the model to learn the underlying matching semantics across different query-document pairs and leads to improved robustness. In experiments with four passage ranking datasets, the proposed contrastive fine-tuning method obtains improvements on robustness to query reformulations, noise perturbations, and zero-shot transfer for both BERT and BART-based rankers. Additionally, our experiments show that contrastive fine-tuning outperforms data augmentation for robustifying neural rankers.

Contrastive Fine-tuning Improves Robustness for Neural Rankers

Cross-language entity linking grounds mentions written in several languages to a monolingual knowledge base.
We use a simple neural ranking architecture for this task that uses multilingual BERT representations of both the mention and the context as input, so as to explore the ability of a transformer model to perform well on this task.
We find that the multilingual ability of BERT leads to good performance in monolingual and multilingual settings.
Furthermore, we explore zero-shot language transfer and find surprisingly robust performance. 
We conduct several analyses to identify the sources of performance degradation in the zero-shot setting. Results indicate that while multilingual transformer models transfer well between languages, issues remain in disambiguating similar entities unseen in training.

TellMeWhy: A Dataset for Answering Why-Questions in Narratives

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TellMeWhy: A Dataset for Answering Why-Questions in Narratives

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Improving the Faithfulness of Attention-based Explanations with Task-specific Information for Text Classification

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QED: A Framework and Dataset for Explanations in Question Answering

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