Pratyay Banerjee


2021

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WeaQA: Weak Supervision via Captions for Visual Question Answering
Pratyay Banerjee | Tejas Gokhale | Yezhou Yang | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Constructing Flow Graphs from Procedural Cybersecurity Texts
Kuntal Kumar Pal | Kazuaki Kashihara | Pratyay Banerjee | Swaroop Mishra | Ruoyu Wang | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Self-Supervised Test-Time Learning for Reading Comprehension
Pratyay Banerjee | Tejas Gokhale | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent work on unsupervised question answering has shown that models can be trained with procedurally generated question-answer pairs and can achieve performance competitive with supervised methods. In this work, we consider the task of unsupervised reading comprehension and present a method that performs “test-time learning” (TTL) on a given context (text passage), without requiring training on large-scale human-authored datasets containing context-question-answer triplets. This method operates directly on a single test context, uses self-supervision to train models on synthetically generated question-answer pairs, and then infers answers to unseen human-authored questions for this context. Our method achieves accuracies competitive with fully supervised methods and significantly outperforms current unsupervised methods. TTL methods with a smaller model are also competitive with the current state-of-the-art in unsupervised reading comprehension.

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Unsupervised Pronoun Resolution via Masked Noun-Phrase Prediction
Ming Shen | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In this work, we propose Masked Noun-Phrase Prediction (MNPP), a pre-training strategy to tackle pronoun resolution in a fully unsupervised setting. Firstly, We evaluate our pre-trained model on various pronoun resolution datasets without any finetuning. Our method outperforms all previous unsupervised methods on all datasets by large margins. Secondly, we proceed to a few-shot setting where we finetune our pre-trained model on WinoGrande-S and XS separately. Our method outperforms RoBERTa-large baseline with large margins, meanwhile, achieving a higher AUC score after further finetuning on the remaining three official splits of WinoGrande.

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Weakly-Supervised Visual-Retriever-Reader for Knowledge-based Question Answering
Man Luo | Yankai Zeng | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires answering questions with external knowledge in addition to the content of images. One dataset that is mostly used in evaluating knowledge-based VQA is OK-VQA, but it lacks a gold standard knowledge corpus for retrieval. Existing work leverage different knowledge bases (e.g., ConceptNet and Wikipedia) to obtain external knowledge. Because of varying knowledge bases, it is hard to fairly compare models’ performance. To address this issue, we collect a natural language knowledge base that can be used for any VQA system. Moreover, we propose a Visual Retriever-Reader pipeline to approach knowledge-based VQA. The visual retriever aims to retrieve relevant knowledge, and the visual reader seeks to predict answers based on given knowledge. We introduce various ways to retrieve knowledge using text and images and two reader styles: classification and extraction. Both the retriever and reader are trained with weak supervision. Our experimental results show that a good retriever can significantly improve the reader’s performance on the OK-VQA challenge. The code and corpus are provided in https://github.com/luomancs/retriever_reader_for_okvqa.git.

2020

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Self-Supervised Knowledge Triplet Learning for Zero-Shot Question Answering
Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The aim of all Question Answering (QA) systems is to generalize to unseen questions. Current supervised methods are reliant on expensive data annotation. Moreover, such annotations can introduce unintended annotator bias, making systems focus more on the bias than the actual task. This work proposes Knowledge Triplet Learning (KTL), a self-supervised task over knowledge graphs. We propose heuristics to create synthetic graphs for commonsense and scientific knowledge. We propose using KTL to perform zero-shot question answering, and our experiments show considerable improvements over large pre-trained transformer language models.

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Video2Commonsense: Generating Commonsense Descriptions to Enrich Video Captioning
Zhiyuan Fang | Tejas Gokhale | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent’s actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captioning videos or when answering questions about videos, one must have an understanding of these commonsense aspects. We present the first work on generating commonsense captions directly from videos, to describe latent aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes. We present a new dataset “Video-to-Commonsense (V2C)” that contains ~9k videos of human agents performing various actions, annotated with 3 types of commonsense descriptions. Additionally we explore the use of open-ended video-based commonsense question answering (V2C-QA) as a way to enrich our captions. Both the generation task and the QA task can be used to enrich video captions.

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MUTANT: A Training Paradigm for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Visual Question Answering
Tejas Gokhale | Pratyay Banerjee | Chitta Baral | Yezhou Yang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

While progress has been made on the visual question answering leaderboards, models often utilize spurious correlations and priors in datasets under the i.i.d. setting. As such, evaluation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples has emerged as a proxy for generalization. In this paper, we present MUTANT, a training paradigm that exposes the model to perceptually similar, yet semantically distinct mutations of the input, to improve OOD generalization, such as the VQA-CP challenge. Under this paradigm, models utilize a consistency-constrained training objective to understand the effect of semantic changes in input (question-image pair) on the output (answer). Unlike existing methods on VQA-CP, MUTANT does not rely on the knowledge about the nature of train and test answer distributions. MUTANT establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy on VQA-CP with a 10.57% improvement. Our work opens up avenues for the use of semantic input mutations for OOD generalization in question answering.

2019

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Careful Selection of Knowledge to Solve Open Book Question Answering
Pratyay Banerjee | Kuntal Kumar Pal | Arindam Mitra | Chitta Baral
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Open book question answering is a type of natural language based QA (NLQA) where questions are expected to be answered with respect to a given set of open book facts, and common knowledge about a topic. Recently a challenge involving such QA, OpenBookQA, has been proposed. Unlike most other NLQA that focus on linguistic understanding, OpenBookQA requires deeper reasoning involving linguistic understanding as well as reasoning with common knowledge. In this paper we address QA with respect to the OpenBookQA dataset and combine state of the art language models with abductive information retrieval (IR), information gain based re-ranking, passage selection and weighted scoring to achieve 72.0% accuracy, an 11.6% improvement over the current state of the art.

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ASU at TextGraphs 2019 Shared Task: Explanation ReGeneration using Language Models and Iterative Re-Ranking
Pratyay Banerjee
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)

In this work we describe the system from Natural Language Processing group at Arizona State University for the TextGraphs 2019 Shared Task. The task focuses on Explanation Regeneration, an intermediate step towards general multi-hop inference on large graphs. Our approach consists of modeling the explanation regeneration task as a learning to rank problem, for which we use state-of-the-art language models and explore dataset preparation techniques. We utilize an iterative reranking based approach to further improve the rankings. Our system secured 2nd rank in the task with a mean average precision (MAP) of 41.3% on the test set.