No Arabic abstract
Augmenting pre-trained language models with knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, for a given task instance, the KG, or certain parts of the KG, may not be useful. Although KG-augmented models often use attention to focus on specific KG components, the KG is still always used, and the attention mechanism is never explicitly taught which KG components should be used. Meanwhile, saliency methods can measure how much a KG feature (e.g., graph, node, path) influences the model to make the correct prediction, thus explaining which KG features are useful. This paper explores how saliency explanations can be used to improve KG-augmented models performance. First, we propose to create coarse (Is the KG useful?) and fine (Which nodes/paths in the KG are useful?) saliency explanations. Second, we propose SalKG, a framework for KG-augmented models to learn from coarse and/or fine saliency explanations. Given saliency explanations created from a tasks training set, SalKG jointly trains the model to predict the explanations, then solve the task by attending to KG features highlighted by the predicted explanations. On two popular commonsense QA benchmarks (CSQA, OBQA), we show that textsc{SalKG} models can yield large performance gains -- up to 3.27% on CSQA.
Recently, knowledge graph (KG) augmented models have achieved noteworthy success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, KG edge (fact) sparsity and noisy edge extraction/generation often hinder models from obtaining useful knowledge to reason over. To address these issues, we propose a new KG-augmented model: Hybrid Graph Network (HGN). Unlike prior methods, HGN learns to jointly contextualize extracted and generated knowledge by reasoning over both within a unified graph structure. Given the task input context and an extracted KG subgraph, HGN is trained to generate embeddings for the subgraphs missing edges to form a hybrid graph, then reason over the hybrid graph while filtering out context-irrelevant edges. We demonstrate HGNs effectiveness through considerable performance gains across four commonsense reasoning benchmarks, plus a user study on edge validness and helpfulness.
Many commonsense reasoning NLP tasks involve choosing between one or more possible answers to a question or prompt based on knowledge that is often implicit. Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on such tasks, while providing little human-interpretable evidence of the underlying reasoning they use. In this work, we show how to use these same models to generate such evidence: inspired by the contrastive nature of human explanations, we use PLMs to complete explanation prompts which contrast alternatives according to the key attribute(s) required to justify the correct answer (for example, peanuts are usually salty while raisins are sweet). Conditioning model decisions on these explanations improves performance on two commonsense reasoning benchmarks, as compared to previous non-contrastive alternatives. These explanations are also judged by humans to be more relevant for solving the task, and facilitate a novel method to evaluate explanation faithfulfness.
Despite the success of generative pre-trained language models on a series of text generation tasks, they still suffer in cases where reasoning over underlying commonsense knowledge is required during generation. Existing approaches that integrate commonsense knowledge into generative pre-trained language models simply transfer relational knowledge by post-training on individual knowledge triples while ignoring rich connections within the knowledge graph. We argue that exploiting both the structural and semantic information of the knowledge graph facilitates commonsense-aware text generation. In this paper, we propose Generation with Multi-Hop Reasoning Flow (GRF) that enables pre-trained models with dynamic multi-hop reasoning on multi-relational paths extracted from the external commonsense knowledge graph. We empirically show that our model outperforms existing baselines on three text generation tasks that require reasoning over commonsense knowledge. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the dynamic multi-hop reasoning module with reasoning paths inferred by the model that provide rationale to the generation.
Commonsense knowledge (CSK) supports a variety of AI applications, from visual understanding to chatbots. Prior works on acquiring CSK, such as ConceptNet, have compiled statements that associate concepts, like everyday objects or activities, with properties that hold for most or some instances of the concept. Each concept is treated in isolation from other concepts, and the only quantitative measure (or ranking) of properties is a confidence score that the statement is valid. This paper aims to overcome these limitations by introducing a multi-faceted model of CSK statements and methods for joint reasoning over sets of inter-related statements. Our model captures four different dimensions of CSK statements: plausibility, typicality, remarkability and salience, with scoring and ranking along each dimension. For example, hyenas drinking water is typical but not salient, whereas hyenas eating carcasses is salient. For reasoning and ranking, we develop a method with soft constraints, to couple the inference over concepts that are related in in a taxonomic hierarchy. The reasoning is cast into an integer linear programming (ILP), and we leverage the theory of reduction costs of a relaxed LP to compute informative rankings. This methodology is applied to several large CSK collections. Our evaluation shows that we can consolidate these inputs into much cleaner and more expressive knowledge. Results are available at https://dice.mpi-inf.mpg.de.
Pre-trained language models have led to substantial gains over a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but have been shown to have limitations for natural language generation tasks with high-quality requirements on the output, such as commonsense generation and ad keyword generation. In this work, we present a novel Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive learning Network (KFCNet) which references external knowledge and achieves better generation performance. Specifically, we propose a BERT-based filter model to remove low-quality candidates, and apply contrastive learning separately to each of the encoder and decoder, within a general encoder--decoder architecture. The encoder contrastive module helps to capture global target semantics during encoding, and the decoder contrastive module enhances the utility of retrieved prototypes while learning general features. Extensive experiments on the CommonGen benchmark show that our model outperforms the previous state of the art by a large margin: +6.6 points (42.5 vs. 35.9) for BLEU-4, +3.7 points (33.3 vs. 29.6) for SPICE, and +1.3 points (18.3 vs. 17.0) for CIDEr. We further verify the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive module on ad keyword generation, and show that our model has potential commercial value.