arXiv subjects

Qiang Ning

Publications and source records attributed to Qiang Ning.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Self-supervised Analogical Learning using Language Models

Large language models have been shown to suffer from reasoning inconsistency issues. That is, they fail more in situations unfamiliar to the training data, even though exact or very similar reasoning paths exist in more common cases that they can successfully solve. Such observations motivate us to propose methods that encourage models to understand the high-level and abstract reasoning processes during training instead of only the final answer. This way, models can transfer the exact solution to similar cases, regardless of their relevance to the pre-training data distribution. In this work, we propose SAL, a self-supervised analogical learning framework. SAL mimics the human analogy process and trains models to explicitly transfer high-quality symbolic solutions from cases that they know how to solve to other rare cases in which they tend to fail more. We show that the resulting models after SAL learning outperform base language models on a wide range of reasoning benchmarks, such as StrategyQA, GSM8K, and HotpotQA, by 2% to 20%. At the same time, we show that our model is more generalizable and controllable through analytical studies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Open Domain Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts

Open domain question answering systems frequently rely on information retrieved from large collections of text (such as the Web) to answer questions. However, such collections of text often contain conflicting information, and indiscriminately depending on this information may result in untruthful and inaccurate answers. To understand the gravity of this problem, we collect a human-annotated dataset, Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts (QACC), and find that as much as 25% of unambiguous, open domain questions can lead to conflicting contexts when retrieved using Google Search. We evaluate and benchmark three powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with our dataset QACC and demonstrate their limitations in effectively addressing questions with conflicting information. To explore how humans reason through conflicting contexts, we request our annotators to provide explanations for their selections of correct answers. We demonstrate that by finetuning LLMs to explain their answers, we can introduce richer information into their training that guide them through the process of reasoning with conflicting contexts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

From Instructions to Constraints: Language Model Alignment with Automatic Constraint Verification

User alignment is crucial for adapting general-purpose language models (LMs) to downstream tasks, but human annotations are often not available for all types of instructions, especially those with customized constraints. We observe that user instructions typically contain constraints. While assessing response quality in terms of the whole instruction is often costly, efficiently evaluating the satisfaction rate of constraints is feasible. We investigate common constraints in NLP tasks, categorize them into three classes based on the types of their arguments, and propose a unified framework, ACT (Aligning to ConsTraints), to automatically produce supervision signals for user alignment with constraints. Specifically, ACT uses constraint verifiers, which are typically easy to implement in practice, to compute constraint satisfaction rate (CSR) of each response. It samples multiple responses for each prompt and collect preference labels based on their CSR automatically. Subsequently, ACT adapts the LM to the target task through a ranking-based learning process. Experiments on fine-grained entity typing, abstractive summarization, and temporal question answering show that ACT is able to enhance LMs' capability to adhere to different classes of constraints, thereby improving task performance. Further experiments show that the constraint-following capabilities are transferable.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Extracting Temporal Event Relation with Syntax-guided Graph Transformer

Extracting temporal relations (e.g., before, after, and simultaneous) among events is crucial to natural language understanding. One of the key challenges of this problem is that when the events of interest are far away in text, the context in-between often becomes complicated, making it challenging to resolve the temporal relationship between them. This paper thus proposes a new Syntax-guided Graph Transformer network (SGT) to mitigate this issue, by (1) explicitly exploiting the connection between two events based on their dependency parsing trees, and (2) automatically locating temporal cues between two events via a novel syntax-guided attention mechanism. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, MATRES and TB-Dense, show that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both end-to-end temporal relation extraction and temporal relation classification; This improvement also proves to be robust on the contrast set of MATRES. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Syntax-Guided-Graph-Transformer.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

PInKS: Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with Minimal Supervision

Reasoning with preconditions such as "glass can be used for drinking water unless the glass is shattered" remains an open problem for language models. The main challenge lies in the scarcity of preconditions data and the model's lack of support for such reasoning. We present PInKS, Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with WeaK Supervision, an improved model for reasoning with preconditions through minimum supervision. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that PInKS improves the results on benchmarks focused on reasoning with the preconditions of commonsense knowledge (up to 40% Macro-F1 scores). We further investigate PInKS through PAC-Bayesian informativeness analysis, precision measures, and ablation study.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Answer Consolidation: Formulation and Benchmarking

Current question answering (QA) systems primarily consider the single-answer scenario, where each question is assumed to be paired with one correct answer. However, in many real-world QA applications, multiple answer scenarios arise where consolidating answers into a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers is a more efficient user interface. In this paper, we formulate the problem of answer consolidation, where answers are partitioned into multiple groups, each representing different aspects of the answer set. Then, given this partitioning, a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers can be constructed by picking one answer from each group. To initiate research on answer consolidation, we construct a dataset consisting of 4,699 questions and 24,006 sentences and evaluate multiple models. Despite a promising performance achieved by the best-performing supervised models, we still believe this task has room for further improvements.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Foreseeing the Benefits of Incidental Supervision

Real-world applications often require improved models by leveraging a range of cheap incidental supervision signals. These could include partial labels, noisy labels, knowledge-based constraints, and cross-domain or cross-task annotations -- all having statistical associations with gold annotations but not exactly the same. However, we currently lack a principled way to measure the benefits of these signals to a given target task, and the common practice of evaluating these benefits is through exhaustive experiments with various models and hyperparameters. This paper studies whether we can, in a single framework, quantify the benefits of various types of incidental signals for a given target task without going through combinatorial experiments. We propose a unified PAC-Bayesian motivated informativeness measure, PABI, that characterizes the uncertainty reduction provided by incidental supervision signals. We demonstrate PABI's effectiveness by quantifying the value added by various types of incidental signals to sequence tagging tasks. Experiments on named entity recognition (NER) and question answering (QA) show that PABI's predictions correlate well with learning performance, providing a promising way to determine, ahead of learning, which supervision signals would be beneficial.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

ESTER: A Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset for Event Semantic Relation Reasoning

Understanding how events are semantically related to each other is the essence of reading comprehension. Recent event-centric reading comprehension datasets focus mostly on event arguments or temporal relations. While these tasks partially evaluate machines' ability of narrative understanding, human-like reading comprehension requires the capability to process event-based information beyond arguments and temporal reasoning. For example, to understand causality between events, we need to infer motivation or purpose; to establish event hierarchy, we need to understand the composition of events. To facilitate these tasks, we introduce ESTER, a comprehensive machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset for Event Semantic Relation Reasoning. The dataset leverages natural language queries to reason about the five most common event semantic relations, provides more than 6K questions and captures 10.1K event relation pairs. Experimental results show that the current SOTA systems achieve 22.1%, 63.3%, and 83.5% for token-based exact-match, F1, and event-based HIT@1 scores, which are all significantly below human performances (36.0%, 79.6%, 100% respectively), highlighting our dataset as a challenging benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Temporal Reasoning on Implicit Events from Distant Supervision

We propose TRACIE, a novel temporal reasoning dataset that evaluates the degree to which systems understand implicit events -- events that are not mentioned explicitly in natural language text but can be inferred from it. This introduces a new challenge in temporal reasoning research, where prior work has focused on explicitly mentioned events. Human readers can infer implicit events via commonsense reasoning, resulting in a more comprehensive understanding of the situation and, consequently, better reasoning about time. We find, however, that state-of-the-art models struggle when predicting temporal relationships between implicit and explicit events. To address this, we propose a neuro-symbolic temporal reasoning model, SYMTIME, which exploits distant supervision signals from large-scale text and uses temporal rules to combine start times and durations to infer end times. SYMTIME outperforms strong baseline systems on TRACIE by 5%, and by 11% in a zero prior knowledge training setting. Our approach also generalizes to other temporal reasoning tasks, as evidenced by a gain of 1%-9% on MATRES, an explicit event benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

SpartQA: : A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning

This paper proposes a question-answering (QA) benchmark for spatial reasoning on natural language text which contains more realistic spatial phenomena not covered by prior work and is challenging for state-of-the-art language models (LM). We propose a distant supervision method to improve on this task. Specifically, we design grammar and reasoning rules to automatically generate a spatial description of visual scenes and corresponding QA pairs. Experiments show that further pretraining LMs on these automatically generated data significantly improves LMs' capability on spatial understanding, which in turn helps to better solve two external datasets, bAbI, and boolQ. We hope that this work can foster investigations into more sophisticated models for spatial reasoning over text.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

QuASE: Question-Answer Driven Sentence Encoding

Question-answering (QA) data often encodes essential information in many facets. This paper studies a natural question: Can we get supervision from QA data for other tasks (typically, non-QA ones)? For example, {\em can we use QAMR (Michael et al., 2017) to improve named entity recognition?} We suggest that simply further pre-training BERT is often not the best option, and propose the {\em question-answer driven sentence encoding (QuASE)} framework. QuASE learns representations from QA data, using BERT or other state-of-the-art contextual language models. In particular, we observe the need to distinguish between two types of sentence encodings, depending on whether the target task is a single- or multi-sentence input; in both cases, the resulting encoding is shown to be an easy-to-use plugin for many downstream tasks. This work may point out an alternative way to supervise NLP tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Learnability with Indirect Supervision Signals

Learning from indirect supervision signals is important in real-world AI applications when, often, gold labels are missing or too costly. In this paper, we develop a unified theoretical framework for multi-class classification when the supervision is provided by a variable that contains nonzero mutual information with the gold label. The nature of this problem is determined by (i) the transition probability from the gold labels to the indirect supervision variables and (ii) the learner's prior knowledge about the transition. Our framework relaxes assumptions made in the literature, and supports learning with unknown, non-invertible and instance-dependent transitions. Our theory introduces a novel concept called \emph{separation}, which characterizes the learnability and generalization bounds. We also demonstrate the application of our framework via concrete novel results in a variety of learning scenarios such as learning with superset annotations and joint supervision signals.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions

A critical part of reading is being able to understand the temporal relationships between events described in a passage of text, even when those relationships are not explicitly stated. However, current machine reading comprehension benchmarks have practically no questions that test temporal phenomena, so systems trained on these benchmarks have no capacity to answer questions such as "what happened before/after [some event]?" We introduce TORQUE, a new English reading comprehension benchmark built on 3.2k news snippets with 21k human-generated questions querying temporal relationships. Results show that RoBERTa-large achieves an exact-match score of 51% on the test set of TORQUE, about 30% behind human performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Easy, Reproducible and Quality-Controlled Data Collection with Crowdaq

High-quality and large-scale data are key to success for AI systems. However, large-scale data annotation efforts are often confronted with a set of common challenges: (1) designing a user-friendly annotation interface; (2) training enough annotators efficiently; and (3) reproducibility. To address these problems, we introduce Crowdaq, an open-source platform that standardizes the data collection pipeline with customizable user-interface components, automated annotator qualification, and saved pipelines in a re-usable format. We show that Crowdaq simplifies data annotation significantly on a diverse set of data collection use cases and we hope it will be a convenient tool for the community.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Evaluating Models' Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets

Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization. Unfortunately, when a dataset has systematic gaps (e.g., annotation artifacts), these evaluations are misleading: a model can learn simple decision rules that perform well on the test set but do not capture a dataset's intended capabilities. We propose a new annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. In particular, after a dataset is constructed, we recommend that the dataset authors manually perturb the test instances in small but meaningful ways that (typically) change the gold label, creating contrast sets. Contrast sets provide a local view of a model's decision boundary, which can be used to more accurately evaluate a model's true linguistic capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of contrast sets by creating them for 10 diverse NLP datasets (e.g., DROP reading comprehension, UD parsing, IMDb sentiment analysis). Although our contrast sets are not explicitly adversarial, model performance is significantly lower on them than on the original test sets---up to 25\% in some cases. We release our contrast sets as new evaluation benchmarks and encourage future dataset construction efforts to follow similar annotation processes.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Joint Event and Temporal Relation Extraction with Shared Representations and Structured Prediction

We propose a joint event and temporal relation extraction model with shared representation learning and structured prediction. The proposed method has two advantages over existing work. First, it improves event representation by allowing the event and relation modules to share the same contextualized embeddings and neural representation learner. Second, it avoids error propagation in the conventional pipeline systems by leveraging structured inference and learning methods to assign both the event labels and the temporal relation labels jointly. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve both event extraction and temporal relation extraction over state-of-the-art systems, with the end-to-end F1 improved by 10% and 6.8% on two benchmark datasets respectively.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Temporal Common Sense Acquisition with Minimal Supervision

Temporal common sense (e.g., duration and frequency of events) is crucial for understanding natural language. However, its acquisition is challenging, partly because such information is often not expressed explicitly in text, and human annotation on such concepts is costly. This work proposes a novel sequence modeling approach that exploits explicit and implicit mentions of temporal common sense, extracted from a large corpus, to build TACOLM, a temporal common sense language model. Our method is shown to give quality predictions of various dimensions of temporal common sense (on UDST and a newly collected dataset from RealNews). It also produces representations of events for relevant tasks such as duration comparison, parent-child relations, event coreference and temporal QA (on TimeBank, HiEVE and MCTACO) that are better than using the standard BERT. Thus, it will be an important component of temporal NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

"Going on a vacation" takes longer than "Going for a walk": A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding

Understanding time is crucial for understanding events expressed in natural language. Because people rarely say the obvious, it is often necessary to have commonsense knowledge about various temporal aspects of events, such as duration, frequency, and temporal order. However, this important problem has so far received limited attention. This paper systematically studies this temporal commonsense problem. Specifically, we define five classes of temporal commonsense, and use crowdsourcing to develop a new dataset, MCTACO, that serves as a test set for this task. We find that the best current methods used on MCTACO are still far behind human performance, by about 20%, and discuss several directions for improvement. We hope that the new dataset and our study here can foster more future research on this topic.

cs.CL↗