No Arabic abstract
The global geometry of language models is important for a range of applications, but language model probes tend to evaluate rather local relations, for which ground truths are easily obtained. In this paper we exploit the fact that in geography, ground truths are available beyond local relations. In a series of experiments, we evaluate the extent to which language model representations of city and country names are isomorphic to real-world geography, e.g., if you tell a language model where Paris and Berlin are, does it know the way to Rome? We find that language models generally encode limited geographic information, but with larger models performing the best, suggesting that geographic knowledge can be induced from higher-order co-occurrence statistics.
Recent work has presented intriguing results examining the knowledge contained in language models (LM) by having the LM fill in the blanks of prompts such as Obama is a _ by profession. These prompts are usually manually created, and quite possibly sub-optimal; another prompt such as Obama worked as a _ may result in more accurately predicting the correct profession. Because of this, given an inappropriate prompt, we might fail to retrieve facts that the LM does know, and thus any given prompt only provides a lower bound estimate of the knowledge contained in an LM. In this paper, we attempt to more accurately estimate the knowledge contained in LMs by automatically discovering better prompts to use in this querying process. Specifically, we propose mining-based and paraphrasing-based methods to automatically generate high-quality and diverse prompts, as well as ensemble methods to combine answers from different prompts. Extensive experiments on the LAMA benchmark for extracting relational knowledge from LMs demonstrate that our methods can improve accuracy from 31.1% to 39.6%, providing a tighter lower bound on what LMs know. We have released the code and the resulting LM Prompt And Query Archive (LPAQA) at https://github.com/jzbjyb/LPAQA.
Inspired by evidence that pretrained language models (LMs) encode commonsense knowledge, recent work has applied LMs to automatically populate commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs). However, there is a lack of understanding on their generalization to multiple CKGs, unseen relations, and novel entities. This paper analyzes the ability of LMs to perform generalizable commonsense inference, in terms of knowledge capacity, transferability, and induction. Our experiments with these three aspects show that: (1) LMs can adapt to different schemas defined by multiple CKGs but fail to reuse the knowledge to generalize to new relations. (2) Adapted LMs generalize well to unseen subjects, but less so on novel objects. Future work should investigate how to improve the transferability and induction of commonsense mining from LMs.
Is it possible to use natural language to intervene in a models behavior and alter its prediction in a desired way? We investigate the effectiveness of natural language interventions for reading-comprehension systems, studying this in the context of social stereotypes. Specifically, we propose a new language understanding task, Linguistic Ethical Interventions (LEI), where the goal is to amend a question-answering (QA) models unethical behavior by communicating context-specific principles of ethics and equity to it. To this end, we build upon recent methods for quantifying a systems social stereotypes, augmenting them with different kinds of ethical interventions and the desired model behavior under such interventions. Our zero-shot evaluation finds that even todays powerful neural language models are extremely poor ethical-advice takers, that is, they respond surprisingly little to ethical interventions even though these interventions are stated as simple sentences. Few-shot learning improves model behavior but remains far from the desired outcome, especially when evaluated for various types of generalization. Our new task thus poses a novel language understanding challenge for the community.
A neural network deployed in the wild may be asked to make predictions for inputs that were drawn from a different distribution than that of the training data. A plethora of work has demonstrated that it is easy to find or synthesize inputs for which a neural network is highly confident yet wrong. Generative models are widely viewed to be robust to such mistaken confidence as modeling the density of the input features can be used to detect novel, out-of-distribution inputs. In this paper we challenge this assumption. We find that the density learned by flow-based models, VAEs, and PixelCNNs cannot distinguish images of common objects such as dogs, trucks, and horses (i.e. CIFAR-10) from those of house numbers (i.e. SVHN), assigning a higher likelihood to the latter when the model is trained on the former. Moreover, we find evidence of this phenomenon when pairing several popular image data sets: FashionMNIST vs MNIST, CelebA vs SVHN, ImageNet vs CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 / SVHN. To investigate this curious behavior, we focus analysis on flow-based generative models in particular since they are trained and evaluated via the exact marginal likelihood. We find such behavior persists even when we restrict the flows to constant-volume transformations. These transformations admit some theoretical analysis, and we show that the difference in likelihoods can be explained by the location and variances of the data and the model curvature. Our results caution against using the density estimates from deep generative models to identify inputs similar to the training distribution until their behavior for out-of-distribution inputs is better understood.
Back-translation provides a simple yet effective approach to exploit monolingual corpora in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Its iterative variant, where two opposite NMT models are jointly trained by alternately using a synthetic parallel corpus generated by the reverse model, plays a central role in unsupervised machine translation. In order to start producing sound translations and provide a meaningful training signal to each other, existing approaches rely on either a separate machine translation system to warm up the iterative procedure, or some form of pre-training to initialize the weights of the model. In this paper, we analyze the role that such initialization plays in iterative back-translation. Is the behavior of the final system heavily dependent on it? Or does iterative back-translation converge to a similar solution given any reasonable initialization? Through a series of empirical experiments over a diverse set of warmup systems, we show that, although the quality of the initial system does affect final performance, its effect is relatively small, as iterative back-translation has a strong tendency to convergence to a similar solution. As such, the margin of improvement left for the initialization method is narrow, suggesting that future research should focus more on improving the iterative mechanism itself.