2022
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To What Extent Do Natural Language Understanding Datasets Correlate to Logical Reasoning? A Method for Diagnosing Logical Reasoning.
Yitian Li
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Jidong Tian
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Wenqing Chen
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Caoyun Fan
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Reasoning and knowledge-related skills are considered as two fundamental skills for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as machine reading comprehension (MRC) and natural language inference (NLI). However, it is not clear to what extent an NLU task defined on a dataset correlates to a specific NLU skill. On the one hand, evaluating the correlation requires an understanding of the significance of the NLU skill in a dataset. Significance judges whether a dataset includes sufficient material to help the model master this skill. On the other hand, it is also necessary to evaluate the dependence of the task on the NLU skill. Dependence is a measure of how much the task defined on a dataset depends on the skill. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to diagnose the correlations between an NLU dataset and a specific skill, and then take a fundamental reasoning skill, logical reasoning, as an example for analysis. The method adopts a qualitative indicator to indicate the significance while adopting a quantitative indicator to measure the dependence. We perform diagnosis on 8 MRC datasets (including two types) and 3 NLI datasets and acquire intuitively reasonable results. We then perform the analysis to further understand the results and the proposed indicators. Based on the analysis, although the diagnostic method has some limitations, it is still an effective method to perform a basic diagnosis of the correlation between the dataset and logical reasoning skill, which also can be generalized to other NLU skills.
2021
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End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer
Liqiang Xiao
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Jun Ma
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Xin Luna Dong
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Pascual Martínez-Gómez
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Nasser Zalmout
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Chenwei Zhang
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Tong Zhao
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data. In this work we first propose ConvSearch, an end-to-end conversational search system that deeply combines the dialog system with search. It leverages the text profile to retrieve products, which is more robust against imperfect product schema/knowledge compared with using product attributes alone. We then address the lack of data challenges by proposing an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterances by using existing dialog from other domains, and leveraging the search behavior data from e-commerce retailer. With utterance transfer, we introduce a new conversational search dataset for online shopping. Experiments show that our utterance transfer method can significantly improve the availability of training dialogue data without crowd-sourcing, and the conversational search system significantly outperformed the best tested baseline.
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Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI
Jidong Tian
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Yitian Li
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Wenqing Chen
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Liqiang Xiao
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recently, language models (LMs) have achieved significant performance on many NLU tasks, which has spurred widespread interest for their possible applications in the scientific and social area. However, LMs have faced much criticism of whether they are truly capable of reasoning in NLU. In this work, we propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic (FOL) reasoning with a new proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. LogicNLI is an NLI-style dataset that effectively disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. Experiments on BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet, have uncovered the weaknesses of these LMs on FOL reasoning, which motivates future exploration to enhance the reasoning ability.
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De-Confounded Variational Encoder-Decoder for Logical Table-to-Text Generation
Wenqing Chen
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Jidong Tian
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Yitian Li
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Logical table-to-text generation aims to automatically generate fluent and logically faithful text from tables. The task remains challenging where deep learning models often generated linguistically fluent but logically inconsistent text. The underlying reason may be that deep learning models often capture surface-level spurious correlations rather than the causal relationships between the table x and the sentence y. Specifically, in the training stage, a model can get a low empirical loss without understanding x and use spurious statistical cues instead. In this paper, we propose a de-confounded variational encoder-decoder (DCVED) based on causal intervention, learning the objective p(y|do(x)). Firstly, we propose to use variational inference to estimate the confounders in the latent space and cooperate with the causal intervention based on Pearl’s do-calculus to alleviate the spurious correlations. Secondly, to make the latent confounder meaningful, we propose a back-prediction process to predict the not-used entities but linguistically similar to the exactly selected ones. Finally, since our variational model can generate multiple candidates, we train a table-text selector to find out the best candidate sentence for the given table. An extensive set of experiments show that our model outperforms the baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two logical table-to-text datasets in terms of logical fidelity.
2020
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A Semantically Consistent and Syntactically Variational Encoder-Decoder Framework for Paraphrase Generation
Wenqing Chen
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Jidong Tian
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Liqiang Xiao
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Paraphrase generation aims to generate semantically consistent sentences with different syntactic realizations. Most of the recent studies rely on the typical encoder-decoder framework where the generation process is deterministic. However, in practice, the ability to generate multiple syntactically different paraphrases is important. Recent work proposed to cooperate variational inference on a target-related latent variable to introduce the diversity. But the latent variable may be contaminated by the semantic information of other unrelated sentences, and in turn, change the conveyed meaning of generated paraphrases. In this paper, we propose a semantically consistent and syntactically variational encoder-decoder framework, which uses adversarial learning to ensure the syntactic latent variable be semantic-free. Moreover, we adopt another discriminator to improve the word-level and sentence-level semantic consistency. So the proposed framework can generate multiple semantically consistent and syntactically different paraphrases. The experiments show that our model outperforms the baseline models on the metrics based on both n-gram matching and semantic similarity, and our model can generate multiple different paraphrases by assembling different syntactic variables.
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Exploring Logically Dependent Multi-task Learning with Causal Inference
Wenqing Chen
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Jidong Tian
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Liqiang Xiao
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Previous studies have shown that hierarchical multi-task learning (MTL) can utilize task dependencies by stacking encoders and outperform democratic MTL. However, stacking encoders only considers the dependencies of feature representations and ignores the label dependencies in logically dependent tasks. Furthermore, how to properly utilize the labels remains an issue due to the cascading errors between tasks. In this paper, we view logically dependent MTL from the perspective of causal inference and suggest a mediation assumption instead of the confounding assumption in conventional MTL models. We propose a model including two key mechanisms: label transfer (LT) for each task to utilize the labels of all its lower-level tasks, and Gumbel sampling (GS) to deal with cascading errors. In the field of causal inference, GS in our model is essentially a counterfactual reasoning process, trying to estimate the causal effect between tasks and utilize it to improve MTL. We conduct experiments on two English datasets and one Chinese dataset. Experiment results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art on six out of seven subtasks and improves predictions’ consistency.
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Modeling Content Importance for Summarization with Pre-trained Language Models
Liqiang Xiao
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Lu Wang
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Hao He
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Yaohui Jin
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Modeling content importance is an essential yet challenging task for summarization. Previous work is mostly based on statistical methods that estimate word-level salience, which does not consider semantics and larger context when quantifying importance. It is thus hard for these methods to generalize to semantic units of longer text spans. In this work, we apply information theory on top of pre-trained language models and define the concept of importance from the perspective of information amount. It considers both the semantics and context when evaluating the importance of each semantic unit. With the help of pre-trained language models, it can easily generalize to different kinds of semantic units n-grams or sentences. Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets demonstrate that our method can better model the importance of content than prior work based on F1 and ROUGE scores.