Self-supervised pretraining has made few-shot learning possible for many NLP tasks. But the pretraining objectives are not typically adapted specifically for in-context few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to use self-supervision in an intermediate training stage between pretraining and downstream few-shot usage with the goal to teach the model to perform in-context few shot learning. We propose and evaluate four self-supervised objectives on two benchmarks. We find that the intermediate self-supervision stage produces models that outperform strong baselines. Ablation study shows that several factors affect the downstream performance, such as the amount of training data and the diversity of the self-supervised objectives. Human-annotated cross-task supervision and self-supervision are complementary. Qualitative analysis suggests that the self-supervised-trained models are better at following task requirements.

We propose EXAMS – a new benchmark dataset for cross-lingual and multilingual question answering for high school examinations. We collected more than 24,000 high-quality high school exam questions in 16 languages, covering 8 language families and 24 school subjects from Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, among others.EXAMS offers unique fine-grained evaluation framework across multiple languages and subjects, which allows precise analysis and comparison of the proposed models. We perform various experiments with existing top-performing multilingual pre-trained models and show that EXAMS offers multiple challenges that require multilingual knowledge and reasoning in multiple domains. We hope that EXAMS will enable researchers to explore challenging reasoning and knowledge transfer methods and pre-trained models for school question answering in various languages which was not possible by now. The data, code, pre-trained models, and evaluation are available at http://github.com/mhardalov/exams-qa.

In this work, we propose to use linguistic annotations as a basis for a Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention encoder that we employ for reading comprehension on narrative texts. We extract relations between discourse units, events, and their arguments as well as coreferring mentions, using available annotation tools. Our empirical evaluation shows that the investigated structures improve the overall performance (up to +3.4 Rouge-L), especially intra-sentential and cross-sentential discourse relations, sentence-internal semantic role relations, and long-distance coreference relations. We show that dedicating self-attention heads to intra-sentential relations and relations connecting neighboring sentences is beneficial for finding answers to questions in longer contexts. Our findings encourage the use of discourse-semantic annotations to enhance the generalization capacity of self-attention models for reading comprehension.

We present a new kind of question answering dataset, OpenBookQA, modeled after open book exams for assessing human understanding of a subject. The open book that comes with our questions is a set of 1326 elementary level science facts. Roughly 6000 questions probe an understanding of these facts and their application to novel situations. This requires combining an open book fact (e.g., metals conduct electricity) with broad common knowledge (e.g., a suit of armor is made of metal) obtained from other sources. While existing QA datasets over documents or knowledge bases, being generally self-contained, focus on linguistic understanding, OpenBookQA probes a deeper understanding of both the topic—in the context of common knowledge—and the language it is expressed in. Human performance on OpenBookQA is close to 92%, but many state-of-the-art pre-trained QA methods perform surprisingly poorly, worse than several simple neural baselines we develop. Our oracle experiments designed to circumvent the knowledge retrieval bottleneck demonstrate the value of both the open book and additional facts. We leave it as a challenge to solve the retrieval problem in this multi-hop setting and to close the large gap to human performance.

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 a very strong baseline on a hard Common Nouns dataset, making it a strong competitor of much more complex models. By including knowledge explicitly, our model can also provide evidence about the background knowledge used in the RC process.

This paper describes two supervised baseline systems for the Story Cloze Test Shared Task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016a). We first build a classifier using features based on word embeddings and semantic similarity computation. We further implement a neural LSTM system with different encoding strategies that try to model the relation between the story and the provided endings. Our experiments show that a model using representation features based on average word embedding vectors over the given story words and the candidate ending sentences words, joint with similarity features between the story and candidate ending representations performed better than the neural models. Our best model based on achieves an accuracy of 72.42, ranking 3rd in the official evaluation.