Everyday conversations require understanding everyday events, which in turn, requires understanding temporal commonsense concepts interwoven with those events. Despite recent progress with massive pre-trained language models (LMs) such as T5 and GPT-3, their capability of temporal reasoning in dialogs remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we present the first study to investigate pre-trained LMs for their temporal reasoning capabilities in dialogs by introducing a new task and a crowd-sourced English challenge set, TimeDial. We formulate TimeDial as a multiple choice cloze task with over 1.1K carefully curated dialogs. Empirical results demonstrate that even the best performing models struggle on this task compared to humans, with 23 absolute points of gap in accuracy. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the models fail to reason about dialog context correctly; instead, they rely on shallow cues based on existing temporal patterns in context, motivating future research for modeling temporal concepts in text and robust contextual reasoning about them. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/google-research-datasets/timedial.

Automatic prediction of personality traits has many real-life applications, e.g., in forensics, recommender systems, personalized services etc.. In this work, we have proposed a solution framework for solving the problem of predicting the personality traits of a user from videos. Ambient, facial and the audio features are extracted from the video of the user. These features are used for the final output prediction. The visual and audio modalities are combined in two different ways: averaging of predictions obtained from the individual modalities, and concatenation of features in multi-modal setting. The dataset released in Chalearn-16 is used for evaluating the performance of the system. Experimental results illustrate that it is possible to obtain better performance with a hand full of images, rather than using all the images present in the video

Procedural text, which describes entities and their interactions as they undergo some process, depicts entities in a uniquely nuanced way. First, each entity may have some observable discrete attributes, such as its state or location; modeling these involves imposing global structure and enforcing consistency. Second, an entity may have properties which are not made explicit but can be effectively induced and tracked by neural networks. In this paper, we propose a structured neural architecture that reflects this dual nature of entity evolution. The model tracks each entity recurrently, updating its hidden continuous representation at each step to contain relevant state information. The global discrete state structure is explicitly modelled with a neural CRF over the changing hidden representation of the entity. This CRF can explicitly capture constraints on entity states over time, enforcing that, for example, an entity cannot move to a location after it is destroyed. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on QA tasks over process paragraphs in the ProPara dataset and find that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.

Tracking entities in procedural language requires understanding the transformations arising from actions on entities as well as those entities’ interactions. While self-attention-based pre-trained language encoders like GPT and BERT have been successfully applied across a range of natural language understanding tasks, their ability to handle the nuances of procedural texts is still unknown. In this paper, we explore the use of pre-trained transformer networks for entity tracking tasks in procedural text. First, we test standard lightweight approaches for prediction with pre-trained transformers, and find that these approaches underperforms even simple baselines. We show that much stronger results can be attained by restructuring the input to guide the model to focus on a particular entity. Second, we assess the degree to which the transformer networks capture the process dynamics, investigating such factors as merged entities and oblique entity references. On two different tasks, ingredient detection in recipes and QA over scientific processes, we achieve state-of-the-art results, but our models still largely attend to shallow context clues and do not form complex representations of intermediate process state.