When people answer questions about a specific situation, e.g., “I cheated on my mid-term exam last week. Was that wrong?”, cognitive science suggests that they form a mental picture of that situation before answering. While we do not know how language models (LMs) answer such questions, we conjecture that they may answer more accurately if they are also provided with additional details about the question situation, elaborating the “scene”. To test this conjecture, we train a new model, DREAM, to answer questions that elaborate the scenes that situated questions are about, and then provide those elaborations as additional context to a question-answering (QA) model. We find that DREAM is able to create better scene elaborations (more accurate, useful, and consistent) than a representative state-of-the-art, zero-shot model (Macaw). We also find that using the scene elaborations as additional context improves the answer accuracy of a downstream QA system, including beyond that obtainable by simply further fine-tuning the QA system on DREAM’s training data. These results suggest that adding focused elaborations about a situation can improve a system’s reasoning about it, and may serve as an effective way of injecting new scenario-based knowledge into QA models. Finally, our approach is dataset-neutral; we observe improved QA performance across different models, with even bigger gains on models with fewer parameters.

Figurative language (e.g., “he flew like the wind”) is challenging to understand, as it is hard to tell what implicit information is being conveyed from the surface form alone. We hypothesize that to perform this task well, the reader needs to mentally elaborate the scene being described to identify a sensible meaning of the language. We present DREAM-FLUTE, a figurative language understanding system that does this, first forming a “mental model” of situations described in a premise and hypothesis before making an entailment/contradiction decision and generating an explanation. DREAM-FLUTE uses an existing scene elaboration model, DREAM, for constructing its “mental model.” In the FigLang2022 Shared Task evaluation, DREAM-FLUTE achieved (joint) first place (Acc@60=63.3%), and can perform even better with ensemble techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. More generally, this work suggests that adding a reflective component to pretrained language models can improve their performance beyond standard fine-tuning (3.3% improvement in Acc@60).

We investigate English pronunciation patterns in Singaporean children in relation to their American and British counterparts by conducting archetypal analysis on selected vowel pairs. Given that Singapore adopts British English as the institutional standard, one might expect Singaporean children to follow British pronunciation patterns, but we observe that Singaporean children also present similar patterns to Americans for TRAP-BATH spilt vowels: (1) British and Singaporean children both produce these vowels with a relatively lowered tongue height. (2) These vowels are more fronted for American and Singaporean children (p < 0.001). In addition, when comparing /æ/ and /ε/ productions, British speakers show the clearest distinction between the two vowels; Singaporean and American speakers exhibit a higher and more fronted tongue position for /æ/ (p < 0.001), causing /æ/ to be acoustically more similar to /ε/.