State-of-the-art neural models can now reach human performance levels across various natural language understanding tasks. However, despite this impressive performance, models are known to learn from annotation artefacts at the expense of the underlying task. While interpretability methods can identify influential features for each prediction, there are no guarantees that these features are responsible for the model decisions. Instead, we introduce a model-agnostic logical framework to determine the specific information in an input responsible for each model decision. This method creates interpretable Natural Language Inference (NLI) models that maintain their predictive power. We achieve this by generating facts that decompose complex NLI observations into individual logical atoms. Our model makes predictions for each atom and uses logical rules to decide the class of the observation based on the predictions for each atom. We apply our method to the highly challenging ANLI dataset, where our framework improves the performance of both a DeBERTa-base and BERT baseline. Our method performs best on the most challenging examples, achieving a new state-of-the-art for the ANLI round 3 test set. We outperform every baseline in a reduced-data setting, and despite using no annotations for the generated facts, our model predictions for individual facts align with human expectations.
In tasks like semantic parsing, instruction following, and question answering, standard deep networks fail to generalize compositionally from small datasets. Many existing approaches overcome this limitation with model architectures that enforce a compositional process of sentence interpretation. In this paper, we present a domain-general and model-agnostic formulation of compositionality as a constraint on symmetries of data distributions rather than models. Informally, we prove that whenever a task can be solved by a compositional model, there is a corresponding data augmentation scheme -- a procedure for transforming examples into other well formed examples -- that imparts compositional inductive bias on any model trained to solve the same task. We describe a procedure called LEXSYM that discovers these transformations automatically, then applies them to training data for ordinary neural sequence models. Unlike existing compositional data augmentation procedures, LEXSYM can be deployed agnostically across text, structured data, and even images. It matches or surpasses state-of-the-art, task-specific models on COGS semantic parsing, SCAN and ALCHEMY instruction following, and CLEVR-COGENT visual question answering datasets.
The impressive performance of recent language models across a wide range of tasks suggests that they possess a degree of abstract reasoning skills. Are these skills general and transferable, or specialized to specific tasks seen during pretraining? To disentangle these effects, we propose an evaluation framework based on "counterfactual" task variants that deviate from the default assumptions underlying standard tasks. Across a suite of 11 tasks, we observe nontrivial performance on the counterfactual variants, but nevertheless find that performance substantially and consistently degrades compared to the default conditions. This suggests that while current LMs may possess abstract task-solving skills to a degree, they often also rely on narrow, non-transferable procedures for task-solving. These results motivate a more careful interpretation of language model performance that teases apart these aspects of behavior.
A growing body of work studies how to answer a question or verify a claim by generating a natural language "proof": a chain of deductive inferences yielding the answer based on a set of premises. However, these methods can only make sound deductions when they follow from evidence that is given. We propose a new system that can handle the underspecified setting where not all premises are stated at the outset; that is, additional assumptions need to be materialized to prove a claim. By using a natural language generation model to abductively infer a premise given another premise and a conclusion, we can impute missing pieces of evidence needed for the conclusion to be true. Our system searches over two fringes in a bidirectional fashion, interleaving deductive (forward-chaining) and abductive (backward-chaining) generation steps. We sample multiple possible outputs for each step to achieve coverage of the search space, at the same time ensuring correctness by filtering low-quality generations with a round-trip validation procedure. Results on a modified version of the EntailmentBank dataset and a new dataset called Everyday Norms: Why Not? show that abductive generation with validation can recover premises across in- and out-of-domain settings
Separation logic's compositionality and local reasoning properties have led to significant advances in scalable static analysis. But program analysis has new challenges--many programs display computational effects (e.g. randomization) and, orthogonally, static analysers must handle incorrectness too. We present Outcome Separation Logic (OSL), a program logic that is sound for both correctness and incorrectness reasoning with varying effects. OSL has a frame rule--just like separation logic--but uses different underlying assumptions that lift restrictions imposed by SL, which precluded reasoning about incorrectness and effects. Building on this foundational theory, we also define symbolic execution algorithms that use bi-abduction to derive specifications for programs with effects. This involves a new tri-abduction procedure to analyze programs whose execution branches due to effects such as nondeterministic or probabilistic choice. This work furthers the compositionality promised by separation logic by opening up the possibility for greater reuse of analysis tools across two dimensions: bug-finding vs verification in programs with varying effects.
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of correcting errorful sentences into grammatically correct, semantically consistent, and coherent sentences. Popular GEC models either use large-scale synthetic corpora or use a large number of human-designed rules. The former is costly to train, while the latter requires quite a lot of human expertise. In recent years, AMR, a semantic representation framework, has been widely used by many natural language tasks due to its completeness and flexibility. A non-negligible concern is that AMRs of grammatically incorrect sentences may not be exactly reliable. In this paper, we propose the AMR-GEC, a seq-to-seq model that incorporates denoised AMR as additional knowledge. Specifically, We design a semantic aggregated GEC model and explore denoising methods to get AMRs more reliable. Experiments on the BEA-2019 shared task and the CoNLL-2014 shared task have shown that AMR-GEC performs comparably to a set of strong baselines with a large number of synthetic data. Compared with the T5 model with synthetic data, AMR-GEC can reduce the training time by 32\% while inference time is comparable. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate AMR for grammatical error correction.
Like conventional software projects, projects in model-driven software engineering require adequate management of multiple versions of development artifacts, importantly allowing living with temporary inconsistencies. In previous work, multi-version models for model-driven software engineering have been introduced, which allow checking well-formedness and finding merge conflicts for multiple versions of a model at once. However, also for multi-version models, situations where different artifacts, that is, different models, are linked via automatic model transformations have to be handled. In this paper, we propose a technique for jointly handling the transformation of multiple versions of a source model into corresponding versions of a target model, which enables the use of a more compact representation that may afford improved execution time of both the transformation and further analysis operations. Our approach is based on the well-known formalism of triple graph grammars and the aforementioned encoding of model version histories called multi-version models. In addition to batch transformation of an entire model version history, the technique also covers incremental synchronization of changes in the framework of multi-version models. We show the correctness of our approach with respect to the standard semantics of triple graph grammars and conduct an empirical evaluation to investigate the performance of our technique regarding execution time and memory consumption. Our results indicate that the proposed technique affords lower memory consumption and may improve execution time for batch transformation of large version histories, but can also come with computational overhead in unfavorable cases.
The advent of large language models trained on code (code LLMs) has led to significant progress in language-to-code generation. State-of-the-art approaches in this area combine LLM decoding with sample pruning and reranking using test cases or heuristics based on the execution results. However, it is challenging to obtain test cases for many real-world language-to-code applications, and heuristics cannot well capture the semantic features of the execution results, such as data type and value range, which often indicates the correctness of the program. In this work, we propose LEVER, a simple approach to improve language-to-code generation by learning to verify the generated programs with their execution results. Specifically, we train verifiers to determine whether a program sampled from the LLMs is correct or not based on the natural language input, the program itself and its execution results. The sampled programs are reranked by combining the verification score with the LLM generation probability, and marginalizing over programs with the same execution results. On four datasets across the domains of table QA, math QA and basic Python programming, LEVER consistently improves over the base code LLMs(4.6% to 10.9% with code-davinci-002) and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them.
Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are fixed-dimensional vector representations of speech segments that encode phonetic content so that different realisations of the same word have similar embeddings. In this paper we explore semantic AWE modelling. These AWEs should not only capture phonetics but also the meaning of a word (similar to textual word embeddings). We consider the scenario where we only have untranscribed speech in a target language. We introduce a number of strategies leveraging a pre-trained multilingual AWE model -- a phonetic AWE model trained on labelled data from multiple languages excluding the target. Our best semantic AWE approach involves clustering word segments using the multilingual AWE model, deriving soft pseudo-word labels from the cluster centroids, and then training a Skipgram-like model on the soft vectors. In an intrinsic word similarity task measuring semantics, this multilingual transfer approach outperforms all previous semantic AWE methods. We also show -- for the first time -- that AWEs can be used for downstream semantic query-by-example search.
Search engine has become a fundamental component in various web and mobile applications. Retrieving relevant documents from the massive datasets is challenging for a search engine system, especially when faced with verbose or tail queries. In this paper, we explore a vector space search framework for document retrieval. Specifically, we trained a deep semantic matching model so that each query and document can be encoded as a low dimensional embedding. Our model was trained based on BERT architecture. We deployed a fast k-nearest-neighbor index service for online serving. Both offline and online metrics demonstrate that our method improved retrieval performance and search quality considerably, particularly for tail
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.