FromSimpletoComplexQA

EduardHovyCMULanguageTechnologiesInstitute

www.cs.cmu.edu/~hovy

WebclopediaQA,2003

•  Wherearezebrasmostlikelyfound? —inthedictionary

•  Wheredolobstersliketolive? —onthetable

•  HowmanypeopleliveinChile? —nine

Webclopedia(Hovyetal.2001)

•  Whatisaninvertebrate? —Dukakis 1

BasicsimplefactoidQA

•  IdentifykeywordsfromQ•  Build(Boolean)queryforIR•  RetrievetextsusingIR•  Ranktexts/passages

•  FindspecifiedQtype•  MoveApatternsovertextand

scoreeachposition•  Rankwindows;returntopN

Alist

InputQ

Corpus:30%

+Web:add10%

1Mdocuments3000sentences

50candidates5answers

…Xwasbornin<YEAR>……Xwasbornon<DATE>……X(<YEAR>–<YEAR>)…

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WhereistheAnswer?—Progresssince2003?

TypicalQAformat:

EithertheQcontextprovidestheA1.  nearby(=n-wordwindow)context 2.  distant(=doc-level)context

Ornotatall…soyouhavetousebackgroundinfo3.  fromthetrainingdata4.  fromlogicalderivation/reasoningrules/procedure 3

Question:QContext:“wwwwww…w”A:

Either…

WhenallinfoneededtogettheAispresentintheQcontext

…thensomeformofsurfaceandsimpletypematching+sub-Acompositionisenough

—>Ultimately,justdo[nested]simpleQA

Or…

ButwhengettingtheArequiresinformationnotintheQcontext(likebackgroundinfo,calculation,etc.)

…thenyouareintrouble:thisisnotstandardized,henceimpossibletoevaluate

—>NocomplexQA!?4

Outline

1.  Ainthenearbycontext2.  Ainthedistantcontext3.  Ahiddeninthetrainingdata4.  Aonlybyreasoning

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Option1:Ainnearbycontext

•  BuildanduseshortpatternsorarichLM•  Tonsofworksince2000onpatternlearningandgeneralization,QAtypologies,etc.

•  NumerousQAdatasets(TREC,SQuAD,CNN…)•  ManyQAcompetitions(SEMEVAL…)

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Sowhere’sthelimit?

YoucandoaLOTwithpatternsDidyouknowyouareanexpertonthe

PanamaCanal?

BlahPanamaCanalblahblahPanamablahPres.RooseveltblahUSAblahblahblahblahblah10yearsblahuntil1914blahblahblahblah51milesblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah8to10hoursblahblahblahblahGatunLakeblah

WhenwasthePanamaCanalcompleted?HowlongisthePanamaCanal?HowlongdidittaketobuildthePanamaCanal?HowlongdoesittaketocrossthePanamaCanal?WhatisthelakeinthePanamaCanalcalled?WhichUSPresidentenabledthePanamaCanal?WhichoceansdoesthePanamaCanalconnect?Inyourtrainingdata,youhavesurelyseen“PanamaCanal”withonlytwooceannames…

7Sowhere’sthelimit?

Acorpustotestthepowerofngram/patternQAmodels

•  CLOTH(Xie,Lai,Dai,Hovy,EMNLP2018)–  Large-scaleClozetestdataset–  CreatedbyEnglishteachersinChinaforEnglishexams(MiddleandHighschoollevels)

– Aftercleanup:7kpassages;99kquestions(2/3removed)

– Droppedwordsandwordoptionscarefullycreatedbyteachers:highlynuancedalternatives

–  Testsknowledgeofgrammar,vocabulary,reasoning•  Howwelldostate-of-the-artcomputationalmodelsdocomparedtohumans?– Wetestusinga1-billion-wordlanguagemodel

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•  Tense,voice,preps•  Localcontentwords

•  Copy/paraphrasewords•  Contentwords,long-distancedependencies

Percentagesoftestexamples,Middle/Highschoollevels

(Xieetal.2018)

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QAsystemresults

•  Evena1B-LMstilllagsbehindhumanperformance•  Increasingthecontextlengthfor1B-LMdoesnothelp•  However:human-createdquestionsaredifferent:

(Xieetal.2018)

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(AR:AttentionReader)

Thiswaspre-BERT!)

Conclusionforoption1

ForfactoidQAtypesthatobeypatterns,iftheAiscloseenough,andyouhaveenoughtrainingdata……youwillalwayslearngoodenoughwordcombinationpatternstoconnectQparameters<–>Qcontextmaterial<–>A

(Ifyouhaven’tseenthenecessarywordcombinations,youwon’teverbeabletoanswertheQ)

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Option2:Aindistantcontext

•  StillusesomeformofmatchingQandA•  Needamore-sophisticatedandlonger-distancetypeof‘pattern’

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Makingmatchingmorecomplex:RACE:Abettertestbed

•  RACE:ReAdingComprehensiondatasetfromExaminations(Lai,Xie,Liu,Yang,Hovy,EMNLP2018)

•  CollectedfromChinesemiddleandhighschoolexamsthatevaluatehumanstudents’Englishreadingcomprehensionability– Designedbyhumanexperts:Ensuresqualityandbroadtopiccoverage

–  SubstantiallymoredifficultthanexistingQAdatasets(butRACE-MeasierthanRACE-H)

– About4/5ofsourcematerialfilteredouttoremoveduplicates,incorrectformat,etc.

•  Aftercleaning:27,933passages;97,687questions

(Laietal.2018)

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Toward‘reasoning’:typesofmore-complexmatching

•  ParaphrasingQs:testlanguageability•  DetailQs:identifyandmatchdetailsofathing

•  AttitudeQs:findopinions/attitudesoftheauthortowardssomething(’sentiment’)

•  Whole-pictureQs:understandtheentirestory(multi-sentence)

•  SummarizationQs:understandthepoint(multi-sentence)

(Laietal.2018)

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Increasingreasoning

ComparisonwithotherQAdatasets•  Reasoningquestions:59.2%ofRACE;20.5%ofSQuAD•  Processingtypes:

–  Wordmatching:exactmatch–  Paraphrasing:paraphraseorentailment–  Single-sentreasoning:incompleteinfoorconceptualoverlap

–  Multi-sentreasoning:synthesizinginformationfrommultiplesentences

–  Insufficient/Ambiguous:noA,orAisnotunique

(Laietal.2018)

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ComparingQAalgorithms

•  Baselines:–  SlidingWindow:TF-IDFbasedmatchingalgorithm–  StanfordAttentionReader(AR)andGatedAttentionReader(early-2018state-of-the-artneuralmodels)

•  RACEhasmore‘semantics’(=requiresmore‘reasoning’)thanothercorpora:–  higherhumanceiling–  harderforneuralmodels

(Laietal.2018)

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Matchingtypeperformance

•  TurkersandSlidingWindowaregoodatsimplematchingquestions

•  Surprisingly,StanfordARdoesnothavebetterperformanceonmatchingquestions

(Laietal.2018)

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Conclusionforoption2

WhentheAisdistant,orrequiresmore-sophisticatedmatching/’reasoning’(notjustsimpleword-string/languagemodel),

thenattention-basedneuralmodelscandosomeofit,butstillfailwiththeharderparts

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Option3:A‘hidden’intrainingdata

SometimestheQcontextdoesnotcontaintheAatall…butyoucanSTILLgettherightA!(AndevengetitwithouttheQitself!)CorruptedngramsandotherSQuADperturbations(JiaandLiang,EMNLP2017)

NecessityofQcontextorevenofQitself(KaushikandLipton,EMNLP2018,BestShortPaperaward)

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Example:QonlyQuestion:shinkanemaru,thegravel-voicedback-roombosswhodiedonthursdayaged81,goesdowninhistoryasjapan’smostcorruptpost-warpoliticianafter___________Passage:...glynisbc-nj-zimmer-profile-2takes-nytrahanefumioyasuhirodragnealhadonbjorkman/max...seventh-largestembarrasedjeopardyhilariouslymasahisahaibarabajram8-to-24duke/meredithacceding...koiduiraqs2:32:21//www.ironmanlive.com/sagawakyubindeaninternatinoal90-meterkakueitanakaseven-paragraph577,610wendovergolf-lpga-jpnpartner,un-appointeduemazzeicanada-u.s.Answer:kakueitanaka

(KaushikandLipton,EMNLP2018)

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Doyouactuallyneedthecontext?

•  Researchgoal:–  HowstrongaremodelsthatseetheQonly?– WhataboutmodelsthatseetheQcontextpassageonly?–  Howdoweknowmodelsarereally“reading”thewholepassage?

•  Question-onlysetting:–  IftheQAsystemneedsthepassage,randomizeitswordsfirst–  IfjustcandidateAsneeded,placetheminrandomspots,fillinterveningtextwithgibberish

•  Passage-onlysetting:–  ‘Ignore’theQs:assigneachQtosomerandompassage

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(KaushikandLiptonEMNLP2018)

Experiments•  Datasets/tests:

–  Spanselection:SQuAD,TriviaQA–  Clozequeries:ChildrensBookTest(CBT),CNN,CLOTH,Who-did-What,DailyMail

–  Multi-classclassification(implicit):bAbI(20tasks)–  Multiple-choicequestionanswering:RACE,MCTest–  Answergeneration:MSMARCO

•  Algorithms:–  Key-ValueMemoryNetworks:

Milleretal.2016:Key-ValueMemoryNetworksforDirectlyReadingDocuments.ProceedingsofEMNLP

–  GatedAttentionReaders:Dhingraetal.2017:Gated-AttentionReadersforTextComprehension.ProceedingsofACL

–  QANet:Yuetal.2018:QANet:CombiningLocalConvolutionwithGlobalSelf-AttentionforReadingComprehension.ProceedingsofICLR

(KaushikandLiptonEMNLP2018)

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Someresults

SQuAD,usingQANet

bAbI,usingKey-ValueMemNets

(KaushikandLiptonEMNLP2018)

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Who-did-What,usingGated-AttentionReaders

CBT,usingGated-AttentionReaders

(KaushikandLiptonEMNLP2018)

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Why?What’sgoingon??Question:shinkanemaru,thegravel-voicedback-roombosswhodiedonthursdayaged81,goesdowninhistoryasjapan’smostcorruptpost-warpoliticianafter___________Passage:...glynisbc-nj-zimmer-profile-2takes-nytrahanefumioyasuhirodragnealhadonbjorkman/max...seventh-largestembarrasedjeopardyhilariouslymasahisahaibarabajram8-to-24duke/meredithacceding...koiduiraqs2:32:21//www.ironmanlive.com/sagawakyubindeaninternatinoal90-meterkakueitanakaseven-paragraph577,610wendovergolf-lpga-jpnpartner,un-appointeduemazzeicanada-u.s.Answer:kakueitanaka

Transportationcompany

Kanemaru’ssecretary

Long-termpolitician

NamenotinGoogle

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Conclusionforoption3

•  Don’ttrustQAdatasets!•  Don’ttrustQAsystemclaims!•  First,checkif

– anypre-existing(=trainingdata)dependenciesamongtheQandcandidateAs?

–  fullcontextpredictstheAwithouteventheQ?

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Option4:Aonlythroughreasoning

FortrulycomplexQA:1.  Identifytheindividualsteps/piecesneeded

toderivetheA2.  Figureouthowtocompute/findthem

– FromtheQcontextand/orfromelsewhere

3.  Compose(andcheck?)them– BuildanAfinding‘script’

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Possiblesourcesofthisknowledge•  Externalsearch:

–  Querysomethinglikethewebandhopetobelucky

•  Entailments:“sentence”–>“sentence”–  Operateatsurfaceform(inRTEformulation)–  Allowonesurfaceformtobestatedwhenanotherisgiven–  NewsurfaceformmayprovideAnswer–  Need:entailmentrules+entailmentapplier

•  Axioms:A∨B–>C–  Operateatdeeperlevel–  Connectrepresentationsubgraphs,evenprovidingnewnodes–  ExpandedgraphmayprovideAnswer–  Need:axioms/compositionrules+theoremprover

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Type1:Apopulartasktoday:QAoverstructureddata

•  Data:database,table,etc.•  Task:askQsthatrequire(1)findingvariousbitsofdataand(2)composingthemtomaketheA

•  Themissinginformationisthescriptgoverningthesequenceofaccessandcomposition

•  Research:howto[learnto]buildthisscript?•  Evaluation:didthesystemproducetherightA?•  Examples:

– U.S.geographydatabaseof800facts(Zelle&Mooney,1996)– Wikitablequestions(PasupatandLiang,2015;Dasigi2018)– Otherdomains’tables(severalAI2projects)

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Wikitabledataset

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Athlete Nation Olympics Medals

Gillis Grafström

Sweden (SWE) 1920–1932 4

Kim Soo-Nyung

South Korea (KOR) 1988-200 6

Evgeni Plushenko Russia (RUS) 2002–2014 4

Kim Yu-na South Korea (KOR) 2010–2014 2

Patrick Chan Canada (CAN) 2014 2

Question:WhichathletewasfromSouthKoreaaftertheyear2010?

Answer:KimYu-Na

Reasoning:1)  GetrowswhereNationcolumn

containsSouthKorea2)  FilterrowswhereOlympicshas

avaluegreaterthan2010.3)  GetvaluefromAthletecolumn

fromfilteredrows.

Program:((reverseathlete)(and (nationsouth_korea) (year((reversedate)

(>=2010-mm-dd)))WikiTableQuestions,PasupatandLiang,2015

(DasigiLTIPhDthesis,2018)

Example:Dasigi•  Approachforlearningtobuildaccessroutines:

1.  ParseQ,builddependencytree2.  ConvertintoLogicalForm3.  Translateintocandidatetableaccessroutine4.  (tryallkindsofmappingsfromwordstoqueryoperators/structure)5.  Testcompositionbyrepeatedtrialanderror

•  Essentially,learningisasearchin‘operatorcombinationspace’tobuildthelogicalform

•  Weaksupervisionisnotenough.Speedupthelearning/searchby:–  Learningtoassociatetableaccessparameterswithpartsofthetree(Q

variables)–  Learningtoassociatenestingandaccessoperatorswithpartsofthetree

(‘operator’words:“themost”,“last”,etc.)–  Predefiningsomelexicon-to-operationmappings–  Payingattentiontogrammaticalconstructionofthetree–  Implementingheuristicstoguideexploration(‘shortQsfirst’)

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(DasigiLTIPhDthesis,2018)

Dasigiapproach•  Strategies:

–  Incorporateknowledgeofgrammaticalconstraints–  ‘Lucky’examples:removerightAwithwrongquerylogic–  Questioncoverage:howmanyQwordsmapped?–  Complexqueries(denotation):howlargeisthequery?–  Doiterativesearch,fromsimplertomorecomplexQs

•  CombineintosingleObjective:Minimizeexpectedvalueofcost(Goodman,1996;GoelandByrne,2000;SmithandEisner,2005)

withalinearcombinationofcoverageanddenotationcosts

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x: NL term y: script term d: denotation

EmpiricalcomparisononWikiTableQuestions

●  Requiresapproximatesetoflogicalformsduringtraining

●  UsedoutputfromDynamicProgrammingonDenotations(PasupatandLiang,2016)

●  Variousmodels:strings,trees,etc.

●  Efficientsearchfollowedbypruningusinghumanannotations

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(Krishnamurthy, Dasigi and Gardner, 2017)

Dasigiresultsusingiterativesearch

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●  Similar trend in 2 domains ●  Used functional query language (Liang et al., 2018)

(Dasigi,Gardner,Murty,Zettlemoyer,Hovy2018)

NLVR WikiTableQuestions

Conclusionforoption4.1

Interestingideato‘operationalize’theQandtestits‘truth’byrunningthescriptfortheA

ButworksonlywithstructuredAsourceswheresuchoperationalizationispossible

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Canwe‘operationalize’other,typicalkindsofQs?

Type2:AnewQAtask:Multi-domainknowledge

Q:WhatisthelargestcapitalcitysouthofSantiagodeChile?

– Geographicknowledge(lat-long,population)– Numericalability(sorting,etc.)

Q:WhichoftheleadersoftheXYZenterprisearewell-liked,andwhy?

– Discoveryofsocialrolebyactions– Sentimentjudgmentsattachedtoactions

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Multi-domainknowledge

•  DefineNself-containedstandardized‘domainspecialists’(KBs+reasoners)thatanyQAenginecanrun

•  Atrun-time,analyzetheQ,buildtheAscript,activatethespecialistsasneeded,computetheA

Arithmetic

GeographyPsych:goals

SocialcustomsPhysics

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Researchneeded

•  Foreachdomainspecialist:– Defineits‘knowledgeservice’–  Createtheunderlyingknowledge– DefinetheI/OAPIsfortheQAenginetouse–  Buildthespecialist

•  ForeachQAengine:– AnalyzetheQ—>determineparametersandneed– Decomposeneed,buildascriptofspecialistqueriesplustheirresultcomposition

–  Execute39

Somespecialistareaswearecurrentlyworkingoninmygroup

1.  Arithmetic/numericalreasoningforentailment(Ravichander,Naik,Rosé,Hovy,CoNLL2019,ACL2019)

2.  Psychgoalsforsentimentjustification(OtaniandHovy,ACL2019)

3.  Socialrolesforgroupactivitysupport(Yang,Kraut,Hov,yEMNLP,HCI,andothers2017–18)

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Topic1.Numericalcalculation

•  Task:Entailmentproblem•  Input:clausescontainingnumbers•  Output:entailed/not-entailed

•  Results:–  EQUATEdatasetextractedfrom~8existingQAandEntailmentresources,withAsadded

–  Baselinenumericalreasonerscoresonthedataset

(Ravichander,Naik,Rose,Hovy,2019)

P:AbombinaHebrewUniversitycafeteriakilledfiveAmericansandfourIsraelisH:AbombingatHebrewUniversityinJerusalemkilledninepeople,includingfiveAmericans

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EQUATEcorpusDataset Size Clas

sesSynthetic

DataSource

AnnotationSource

QuantitativePhenomena

StressTest 7500 3 ✓ AQuA-RAT Automatic Quantifiers

RTE-Quant 166 2 ✗ RTE2-RTE4 Expert Arithmetic,Worldknowledge,Ranges,Quantifiers

AwpNLI 722 2 ✓ ArithmeticWordProblems

Automatic Arithmetic

NewsNLI 1000 2 ✗ CNN Crowd-sourced

Ordinals,Quantifiers,Arithmetic,WorldKnowledge,Magnitude,Ratios

RedditNLI 250 3 ✗ Reddit Expert Range,Arithmetic,Approximation,Verbal

(Ravichanderetal.,2019)

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Baselines(SOTAmethods)•  MajorityClass(MAJ):Simplebaselinealwayspredictsthemajorityclassintestset.•  Hypothesis-Only(HYP):FastTextclassifiertrainedononlyhypothesestopredictthe

entailmentrelation(Gururanganetal.2018)•  ALIGN:Abag-of-wordsalignmentmodelinspiredbyMacCartney(2009)•  NB(NieandBansal2017):SentenceencoderconsistingofstackedBiLSTM-RNNs

withshortcutconnectionsandfine-tuningofembeddings.Achievestopnon-ensembleresultintheRepEval-2017sharedtask

•  CH(Chenetal.2017):SentenceencoderconsistingofstackedBiLSTM-RNNswithshortcutconnections,character-compositionwordembeddingslearnedviaCNNs,intra-sentencegatedattentionandensembling.AchievesbestoverallresultintheRepEval-2017sharedtask

•  RC(Balazsetal.2017):Single-layerBiLSTMwithmeanpoolingandintra-sentenceattention

•  IS(Conneauetal.2017):Single-layerBiLSTM-RNNwithmax-pooling,showntolearnrobustuniversalsentencerepresentationsthattransferwellacrossinferencetasks

•  BiLSTM:WereimplementthesimpleBiLSTMbaselinemodelofNangiaetal.(2017).OurreimplementationachievesslightlybetterresultsontheMultiNLIdevset

•  CBOW:Bag-of-wordssentencerepresentationfromwordembeddingspassedthroughatanhnon-linearityandasoftmaxlayerforclassification.

(Ravichanderetal.,2019)

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Constructingentailmentinferences•  Generateareport

foreachpremise-hypothesispair,consistingof:–  ExtractedNUMSETSforpremiseandhypothesis

–  WhichNUMSETSwerecombinedandbywhatoperation

–  WhichNUMSETSwerejustifiedandwhichweren’t

•  Combinesneuralandsymbolicprograms–  Somesubmodulesareneural;overallframeworkissymbolic–  Lightweightsupervision

(Ravichanderetal.,2019)

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Topic2.Humangoals

•  ComplexQAdomain:humangoalforsentiment–  Ilovedthehotel’spricebuttheroomwasnoisy—>[price+][room-]

•  Task:sentimentjustification:WHYdoestheHolderhavethesentimentvalueforthefacet?

•  Approach:Classifyeachclauseintoalistofhuman(psychologicalandsocial)goals–  Initialset:Maslowhierarchy–  Currently:~110humangoalsfromUSC(Talevichetal.)

•  Data:Crowdsourced;κ≈0.55

(OtaniandHovy,2019)

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(Talevichetal.2017)

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Topic3.Socialroles

•  ComplexQAdomain:Humaninteractionsingroups

•  Task:Automatedsocialrolediscovery–  Input:Discussionsinasocialmediaplatform– Output:Rolelist,andassignmentforeachuser

•  Data:– Wikipediaeditors:ourroletaxonomyconformstoWikipedia’sinternalset

– CancerSurvivorNetworkdiscussiongroups

(Yang,Kraut,Hovy,2018)

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User edit history Role assignments

Information_insertion 0.4 Reference_insertion 0.2 ….

Roles

Grammar 0.2 Markup_deletion 0.1 Rephrase 0.1 ….

Wikilink_insertion 0.2 Wikilink_deletion 0.1 ….

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(Yang,Kraut,Hovy,2018)

LatentrolemodelinWikipedia

Role: distribution of edit actions

Role proportions

Role assignment for user u and word n

Edit actions

(Yang,Kraut,Hovy,2018)

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Discoverededitorroles(namingbyexpert)Expert’s role name Discovered representative behavior

Substantive Expert Information insertion, wikilink insertion, reference insertion

Social Networker Main talk namespace, user namespace

Vandal Fighter Reverting, user talk namespace

Quality Assurance Wikilink insertion, wikipedia namespace, template namespace

Fact Checker Information deletion, wikilink deletion, reference deletion

Cleanup Worker Wikilink modification, template insertion, markup modification

Fact Updater Template modification, reference modification

Copy Editor Grammar, paraphrase, relocation 50

(Yang,Kraut,Hovy,2018)

Topics4–.Otherinferencespecialists

•  GeographyandTime… (see(Allen,CACM1983)and(Davis,JAIR2017))– E.g.:north-of,area-included-in-region…

•  Physics,Biology… (seetheHALOproject)– RecentworkonaspectsofPhysicsatAI2(Clarketal.)

•  Emotions

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Physics:noun-nouncompounds

Whereis…

•  …thekitchentable•  …thecoffeetable•  …thewoodtable•  …theteacher’stable•  …thedatatable

•  Needtoknowtherelationandthenountypestoinferadditionalinfo:

•  LOC•  FUNCTIONèLOC•  MATERIAL•  ?FUNCTIONèLOC?•  TYPESèCONTENTèLOC?

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Conclusionforoption4.2WherenextwithComplexQA?

•  Identifyandbuildthemostusefuldomainspecialists–  Findbasicknowledgeprimitives– Developreasoninglogics,models,andimplementations

– Develop/findQAdatasetsthatexercisethissortofspecialistknowledgeandreasoning

•  Greatoverviewin(Davis,JAIR2018)•  Createacommonlibraryforalltoshare•  EvaluatecorrectnessANDAnswerproductionscripts(traces,as‘explanation’) 53

Open-sourceandgeneral-purpose(notjustscientific/political)versionofWolframAlpha

THANKYOU

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