Yufei Feng


2022

pdf
Neuro-symbolic Natural Logic with Introspective Revision for Natural Language Inference
Yufei Feng | Xiaoyu Yang | Xiaodan Zhu | Michael Greenspan
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

We introduce a neuro-symbolic natural logic framework based on reinforcement learning with introspective revision. The model samples and rewards specific reasoning paths through policy gradient, in which the introspective revision algorithm modifies intermediate symbolic reasoning steps to discover reward-earning operations as well as leverages external knowledge to alleviate spurious reasoning and training inefficiency. The framework is supported by properly designed local relation models to avoid input entangling, which helps ensure the interpretability of the proof paths. The proposed model has built-in interpretability and shows superior capability in monotonicity inference, systematic generalization, and interpretability, compared with previous models on the existing datasets.

2021

pdf
Complementary Evidence Identification in Open-Domain Question Answering
Xiangyang Mou | Mo Yu | Shiyu Chang | Yufei Feng | Li Zhang | Hui Su
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

This paper proposes a new problem of complementary evidence identification for open-domain question answering (QA). The problem aims to efficiently find a small set of passages that covers full evidence from multiple aspects as to answer a complex question. To this end, we proposes a method that learns vector representations of passages and models the sufficiency and diversity within the selected set, in addition to the relevance between the question and passages. Our experiments demonstrate that our method considers the dependence within the supporting evidence and significantly improves the accuracy of complementary evidence selection in QA domain.

2020

pdf
Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network
Xiaoyu Yang | Feng Nie | Yufei Feng | Quan Liu | Zhigang Chen | Xiaodan Zhu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Performing fact verification based on structured data is important for many real-life applications and is a challenging research problem, particularly when it involves both symbolic operations and informal inference based on language understanding. In this paper, we present a Program-enhanced Verbalization and Graph Attention Network (ProgVGAT) to integrate programs and execution into textual inference models. Specifically, a verbalization with program execution model is proposed to accumulate evidences that are embedded in operations over the tables. Built on that, we construct the graph attention verification networks, which are designed to fuse different sources of evidences from verbalized program execution, program structures, and the original statements and tables, to make the final verification decision. To support the above framework, we propose a program selection module optimized with a new training strategy based on margin loss, to produce more accurate programs, which is shown to be effective in enhancing the final verification results. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, a 74.4% accuracy, on the benchmark dataset TABFACT.

pdf
Exploring End-to-End Differentiable Natural Logic Modeling
Yufei Feng | Zi’ou Zheng | Quan Liu | Michael Greenspan | Xiaodan Zhu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We explore end-to-end trained differentiable models that integrate natural logic with neural networks, aiming to keep the backbone of natural language reasoning based on the natural logic formalism while introducing subsymbolic vector representations and neural components. The proposed model adapts module networks to model natural logic operations, which is enhanced with a memory component to model contextual information. Experiments show that the proposed framework can effectively model monotonicity-based reasoning, compared to the baseline neural network models without built-in inductive bias for monotonicity-based reasoning. Our proposed model shows to be robust when transferred from upward to downward inference. We perform further analyses on the performance of the proposed model on aggregation, showing the effectiveness of the proposed subcomponents on helping achieve better intermediate aggregation performance.