Socratic questioning is an educational method that allows students to discover answers to complex problems by asking them a series of thoughtful questions. Generation of didactically sound questions is challenging, requiring understanding of the reasoning process involved in the problem. We hypothesize that such questioning strategy can not only enhance the human performance, but also assist the math word problem (MWP) solvers.In this work, we explore the ability of large language models (LMs) in generating sequential questions for guiding math word problem-solving. We propose various guided question generation schemes based on input conditioning and reinforcement learning.On both automatic and human quality evaluations, we find that LMs constrained with desirable question properties generate superior questions and improve the overall performance of a math word problem solver. We conduct a preliminary user study to examine the potential value of such question generation models in the education domain. Results suggest that the difficulty level of problems plays an important role in determining whether questioning improves or hinders human performance. We discuss the future of using such questioning strategies in education.

Despite the success of contextualized language models on various NLP tasks, it is still unclear what these models really learn. In this paper, we contribute to the current efforts of explaining such models by exploring the continuum between function and content words with respect to contextualization in BERT, based on linguistically-informed insights. In particular, we utilize scoring and visual analytics techniques: we use an existing similarity-based score to measure contextualization and integrate it into a novel visual analytics technique, presenting the model’s layers simultaneously and highlighting intra-layer properties and inter-layer differences. We show that contextualization is neither driven by polysemy nor by pure context variation. We also provide insights on why BERT fails to model words in the middle of the functionality continuum.

The development of linguistic corpora is fraught with various problems of annotation and representation. These constitute a very real challenge for the development and use of annotated corpora, but as yet not much literature exists on how to address the underlying problems. In this paper, we identify and discuss five sources of representation problems, which are independent though interrelated: ambiguity, variation, uncertainty, error and bias. We outline and characterize these sources, discussing how their improper treatment can have stark consequences for research outcomes. Finally, we discuss how an adequate treatment can inform corpus-related linguistic research, both computational and theoretical, improving the reliability of research results and NLP models, as well as informing the more general reproducibility issue.

Advances in Natural Language Inference (NLI) have helped us understand what state-of-the-art models really learn and what their generalization power is. Recent research has revealed some heuristics and biases of these models. However, to date, there is no systematic effort to capitalize on those insights through a system that uses these to explain the NLI decisions. To this end, we propose XplaiNLI, an eXplainable, interactive, visualization interface that computes NLI with different methods and provides explanations for the decisions made by the different approaches.

We present a modular framework for the rapid-prototyping of linguistic, web-based, visual analytics applications. Our framework gives developers access to a rich set of machine learning and natural language processing steps, through encapsulating them into micro-services and combining them into a computational pipeline. This processing pipeline is auto-configured based on the requirements of the visualization front-end, making the linguistic processing and visualization design, detached independent development tasks. This paper describes the constellation and modality of our framework, which continues to support the efficient development of various human-in-the-loop, linguistic visual analytics research techniques and applications.