Benchmarking for syntax-based sentential inference

International audienceWe propose a methodology for investigat- ing how well NLP systems handle mean- ing preserving syntactic variations. We start by presenting a method for the semi automated creation of a benchmark where entailment is mediated solely by meaning preserving syntactic variations. We then use this benchmark to compare a seman- tic role labeller and two grammar based RTE systems. We argue that the proposed methodology (i) supports a modular eval- uation of the ability of NLP systems to handle the syntax/semantic interface and (ii) permits focused error mining and er- ror analysis

Learning Logistic Circuits

This paper proposes a new classification model called logistic circuits. On MNIST and Fashion datasets, our learning algorithm outperforms neural networks that have an order of magnitude more parameters. Yet, logistic circuits have a distinct origin in symbolic AI, forming a discriminative counterpart to probabilistic-logical circuits such as ACs, SPNs, and PSDDs. We show that parameter learning for logistic circuits is convex optimization, and that a simple local search algorithm can induce strong model structures from data.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI19

LoNLI: An Extensible Framework for Testing Diverse Logical Reasoning Capabilities for NLI

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is considered a representative task to test natural language understanding (NLU). In this work, we propose an extensible framework to collectively yet categorically test diverse Logical reasoning capabilities required for NLI (and by extension, NLU). Motivated by behavioral testing, we create a semi-synthetic large test-bench (363 templates, 363k examples) and an associated framework that offers following utilities: 1) individually test and analyze reasoning capabilities along 17 reasoning dimensions (including pragmatic reasoning), 2) design experiments to study cross-capability information content (leave one out or bring one in); and 3) the synthetic nature enable us to control for artifacts and biases. The inherited power of automated test case instantiation from free-form natural language templates (using CheckList), and a well-defined taxonomy of capabilities enable us to extend to (cognitively) harder test cases while varying the complexity of natural language. Through our analysis of state-of-the-art NLI systems, we observe that our benchmark is indeed hard (and non-trivial even with training on additional resources). Some capabilities stand out as harder. Further fine-grained analysis and fine-tuning experiments reveal more insights about these capabilities and the models -- supporting and extending previous observations. Towards the end we also perform an user-study, to investigate whether behavioral information can be utilised to generalize much better for some models compared to others.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2107.0722

Unifying context with labeled property graph: A pipeline-based system for comprehensive text representation in NLP

Extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured digital text presents significant challenges across diverse domains. This research addresses this challenge by proposing a novel pipeline-based system that generates domain-agnostic and task-agnostic text representations. The proposed approach leverages labeled property graphs (LPG) to encode contextual information, facilitating the integration of diverse linguistic elements into a unified representation. The proposed system enables efficient graph-based querying and manipulation by addressing the crucial aspect of comprehensive context modeling and fine-grained semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through the implementation of NLP components that operate on LPG-based representations. Additionally, the proposed approach introduces specialized patterns and algorithms to enhance specific NLP tasks, including nominal mention detection, named entity disambiguation, event enrichments, event participant detection, and temporal link detection. The evaluation of the proposed approach, using the MEANTIME corpus comprising manually annotated documents, provides encouraging results and valuable insights into the system\u27s strengths. The proposed pipeline-based framework serves as a solid foundation for future research, aiming to refine and optimize LPG-based graph structures to generate comprehensive and semantically rich text representations, addressing the challenges associated with efficient information extraction and analysis in NLP