Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversity in the GCR tasks, which aims to generate alternative explanations for a real-world situation or predict all possible outcomes. Diversifying GCR is challenging as it expects to generate multiple outputs that are not only semantically different but also grounded in commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose MoKGE, a novel method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert (MoE) strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs (KG). A set of knowledge experts seek diverse reasoning on KG to encourage various generation outputs. Empirical experiments demonstrated that MoKGE can significantly improve the diversity while achieving on par performance on accuracy on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations.

Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversity in the GCR tasks, which aims to generate alternative explanations for a real-world situation or predict all possible outcomes. Diversifying GCR is challenging as it expects to generate multiple outputs that are not only semantically different but also grounded in commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose MoKGE, a novel method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert (MoE) strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs (KG). A set of knowledge experts seek diverse reasoning on KG to encourage various generation outputs. Empirical experiments demonstrated that MoKGE can significantly improve the diversity while achieving on par performance on accuracy on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations.

A common thread of open-domain question answering (QA) models employs a retriever-reader pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant passages from Wikipedia and then peruses the passages to produce an answer. However, even state-of-the-art readers fail to capture the complex relationships between entities appearing in questions and retrieved passages, leading to answers that contradict the facts. In light of this, we propose a novel knowledge graph enhanced passage reader, namely Grape, to improve the reader performance for open-domain QA. Specifically, for each pair of question and retrieved passage, we first construct a localized bipartite graph, attributed to entity embeddings extracted from the intermediate layer of the reader model. Then, a graph neural network learns relational knowledge while fusing graph and contextual representations into the hidden states of the reader model. Experiments on three open-domain QA benchmarks show Grape can improve the state-of-the-art performance by up to 2.2 exact match score with a negligible overhead increase, with the same retriever and retrieved passages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jumxglhf/GRAPE.

Generating paragraphs of diverse contents is important in many applications. Existing generation models produce similar contents from homogenized contexts due to the fixed left-to-right sentence order. Our idea is permuting the sentence orders to improve the content diversity of multi-sentence paragraph. We propose a novel framework PermGen whose objective is to maximize the expected log-likelihood of output paragraph distributions with respect to all possible sentence orders. PermGen uses hierarchical positional embedding and designs new procedures for training, and decoding in the sentence-permuted generation. Experiments on three paragraph generation benchmarks demonstrate PermGen generates more diverse outputs with a higher quality than existing models.

Textual patterns (e.g., Country’s president Person) are specified and/or generated for extracting factual information from unstructured data. Pattern-based information extraction methods have been recognized for their efficiency and transferability. However, not every pattern is reliable: A major challenge is to derive the most complete and accurate facts from diverse and sometimes conflicting extractions. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model which formulates fact extraction in a generative process. It automatically infers true facts and pattern reliability without any supervision. It has two novel designs specially for temporal facts: (1) it models pattern reliability on two types of time signals, including temporal tag in text and text generation time; (2) it models commonsense constraints as observable variables. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing methods on extracting true temporal facts from news data.

Condition is essential in scientific statement. Without the conditions (e.g., equipment, environment) that were precisely specified, facts (e.g., observations) in the statements may no longer be valid. Existing ScienceIE methods, which aim at extracting factual tuples from scientific text, do not consider the conditions. In this work, we propose a new sequence labeling framework (as well as a new tag schema) to jointly extract the fact and condition tuples from statement sentences. The framework has (1) a multi-output module to generate one or multiple tuples and (2) a multi-input module to feed in multiple types of signals as sequences. It improves F1 score relatively by 4.2% on BioNLP2013 and by 6.2% on a new bio-text dataset for tuple extraction.