Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention

Debjit Paul, Anette Frank


Abstract
Social Commonsense Reasoning requires understanding of text, knowledge about social events and their pragmatic implications, as well as commonsense reasoning skills. In this work we propose a novel multi-head knowledge attention model that encodes semi-structured commonsense inference rules and learns to incorporate them in a transformer-based reasoning cell.We assess the model’s performance on two tasks that require different reasoning skills: Abductive Natural Language Inference and Counterfactual Invariance Prediction as a new task. We show that our proposed model improves performance over strong state-of-the-art models (i.e., RoBERTa) across both reasoning tasks. Notably we are, to the best of our knowledge, the first to demonstrate that a model that learns to perform counterfactual reasoning helps predicting the best explanation in an abductive reasoning task. We validate the robustness of the model’s reasoning capabilities by perturbing the knowledge and provide qualitative analysis on the model’s knowledge incorporation capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.267
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2969–2980
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.267
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.267
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Debjit Paul and Anette Frank. 2020. Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 2969–2980, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention (Paul & Frank, Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.findings-emnlp.267.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.findings-emnlp.267.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940698
Code
 Heidelberg-NLP/MHKA
Data
ATOMICEvent2Mind