Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models

Peter West, Chandra Bhagavatula, Jack Hessel, Jena Hwang, Liwei Jiang, Ronan Le Bras, Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, Yejin Choi


Abstract
The common practice for training commonsense models has gone from–human–to–corpus–to–machine: humans author commonsense knowledge graphs in order to train commonsense models. In this work, we investigate an alternative, from–machine–to–corpus–to–machine: general language models author these commonsense knowledge graphs to train commonsense models. Our study leads to a new framework, Symbolic Knowledge Distillation. As with prior art in Knowledge Distillation (Hinton et al. 2015), our approach uses larger models to teach smaller models. A key difference is that we distill knowledge symbolically–as text–in addition to the neural model. We distill only one aspect–the commonsense of a general language model teacher, allowing the student to be a different type, a commonsense model. Altogether, we show that careful prompt engineering and a separately trained critic model allow us to selectively distill high-quality causal commonsense from GPT-3, a general language model. Empirical results demonstrate that, for the first time, a human-authored commonsense knowledge graph is surpassed by our automatically distilled variant in all three criteria: quantity, quality, and diversity. In addition, it results in a neural commonsense model that surpasses the teacher model’s commonsense capabilities despite its 100x smaller size. We apply this to the ATOMIC resource, and will share our new symbolic knowledge graph and commonsense models.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.341
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4602–4625
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.341
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.341
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter West, Chandra Bhagavatula, Jack Hessel, Jena Hwang, Liwei Jiang, Ronan Le Bras, Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, and Yejin Choi. 2022. Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4602–4625, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models (West et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.naacl-main.341.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.naacl-main.341.mp4
Code
 peterwestai2/symbolic-knowledge-distillation