No Arabic abstract
Turing test was long considered the measure for artificial intelligence. But with the advances in AI, it has proved to be insufficient measure. We can now aim to mea- sure machine intelligence like we measure human intelligence. One of the widely accepted measure of intelligence is standardized math and science test. In this paper, we explore the progress we have made towards the goal of making a machine smart enough to pass the standardized test. We see the challenges and opportunities posed by the domain, and note that we are quite some ways from actually making a system as smart as a even a middle school scholar.
Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to answer a question in the form of natural language based on large-scale unstructured documents. Recently, there has been a surge in the amount of research literature on OpenQA, particularly on techniques that integrate with neural Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). While these research works have advanced performance to new heights on benchmark datasets, they have been rarely covered in existing surveys on QA systems. In this work, we review the latest research trends in OpenQA, with particular attention to systems that incorporate neural MRC techniques. Specifically, we begin with revisiting the origin and development of OpenQA systems. We then introduce modern OpenQA architecture named Retriever-Reader and analyze the various systems that follow this architecture as well as the specific techniques adopted in each of the components. We then discuss key challenges to developing OpenQA systems and offer an analysis of benchmarks that are commonly used. We hope our work would enable researchers to be informed of the recent advancement and also the open challenges in OpenQA research, so as to stimulate further progress in this field.
Questions that require counting a variety of objects in images remain a major challenge in visual question answering (VQA). The most common approaches to VQA involve either classifying answers based on fixed length representations of both the image and question or summing fractional counts estimated from each section of the image. In contrast, we treat counting as a sequential decision process and force our model to make discrete choices of what to count. Specifically, the model sequentially selects from detected objects and learns interactions between objects that influence subsequent selections. A distinction of our approach is its intuitive and interpretable output, as discrete counts are automatically grounded in the image. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state of the art architecture for VQA on multiple metrics that evaluate counting.
We present ASDiv (Academia Sinica Diverse MWP Dataset), a diverse (in terms of both language patterns and problem types) English math word problem (MWP) corpus for evaluating the capability of various MWP solvers. Existing MWP corpora for studying AI progress remain limited either in language usage patterns or in problem types. We thus present a new English MWP corpus with 2,305 MWPs that cover more text patterns and most problem types taught in elementary school. Each MWP is annotated with its problem type and grade level (for indicating the level of difficulty). Furthermore, we propose a metric to measure the lexicon usage diversity of a given MWP corpus, and demonstrate that ASDiv is more diverse than existing corpora. Experiments show that our proposed corpus reflects the true capability of MWP solvers more faithfully.
Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the users information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.
We present a modular approach for learning policies for navigation over long planning horizons from language input. Our hierarchical policy operates at multiple timescales, where the higher-level master policy proposes subgoals to be executed by specialized sub-policies. Our choice of subgoals is compositional and semantic, i.e. they can be sequentially combined in arbitrary orderings, and assume human-interpretable descriptions (e.g. exit room, find kitchen, find refrigerator, etc.). We use imitation learning to warm-start policies at each level of the hierarchy, dramatically increasing sample efficiency, followed by reinforcement learning. Independent reinforcement learning at each level of hierarchy enables sub-policies to adapt to consequences of their actions and recover from errors. Subsequent joint hierarchical training enables the master policy to adapt to the sub-policies. On the challenging EQA (Das et al., 2018) benchmark in House3D (Wu et al., 2018), requiring navigating diverse realistic indoor environments, our approach outperforms prior work by a significant margin, both in terms of navigation and question answering.