Enhancing the Reasoning Capabilities of Natural Language Inference Models with Attention Mechanisms and External Knowledge

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is fundamental to natural language understanding. The task summarises the natural language understanding capabilities within a simple formulation of determining whether a natural language hypothesis can be inferred from a given natural language premise. NLI requires an inference system to address the full complexity of linguistic as well as real-world commonsense knowledge and, hence, the inferencing and reasoning capabilities of an NLI system are utilised in other complex language applications such as summarisation and machine comprehension. Consequently, NLI has received significant recent attention from both academia and industry. Despite extensive research, contemporary neural NLI models face challenges arising from the sole reliance on training data to comprehend all the linguistic and real-world commonsense knowledge. Further, different attention mechanisms, crucial to the success of neural NLI models, present the prospects of better utilisation when employed in combination. In addition, the NLI research field lacks a coherent set of guidelines for the application of one of the most crucial regularisation hyper-parameters in the RNN-based NLI models -- dropout. In this thesis, we present neural models capable of leveraging the attention mechanisms and the models that utilise external knowledge to reason about inference. First, a combined attention model to leverage different attention mechanisms is proposed. Experimentation demonstrates that the proposed model is capable of better modelling the semantics of long and complex sentences. Second, to address the limitation of the sole reliance on the training data, two novel neural frameworks utilising real-world commonsense and domain-specific external knowledge are introduced. Employing the rule-based external knowledge retrieval from the knowledge graphs, the first model takes advantage of the convolutional encoders and factorised bilinear pooling to augment the reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art NLI models. Utilising the significant advances in the research of contextual word representations, the second model, addresses the existing crucial challenges of external knowledge retrieval, learning the encoding of the retrieved knowledge and the fusion of the learned encodings to the NLI representations, in unique ways. Experimentation demonstrates the efficacy and superiority of the proposed models over previous state-of-the-art approaches. Third, for the limitation on dropout investigations, formulated on exhaustive evaluation, analysis and validation on the proposed RNN-based NLI models, a coherent set of guidelines is introduced

A survey on knowledge-enhanced multimodal learning

Multimodal learning has been a field of increasing interest, aiming to combine various modalities in a single joint representation. Especially in the area of visiolinguistic (VL) learning multiple models and techniques have been developed, targeting a variety of tasks that involve images and text. VL models have reached unprecedented performances by extending the idea of Transformers, so that both modalities can learn from each other. Massive pre-training procedures enable VL models to acquire a certain level of real-world understanding, although many gaps can be identified: the limited comprehension of commonsense, factual, temporal and other everyday knowledge aspects questions the extendability of VL tasks. Knowledge graphs and other knowledge sources can fill those gaps by explicitly providing missing information, unlocking novel capabilities of VL models. In the same time, knowledge graphs enhance explainability, fairness and validity of decision making, issues of outermost importance for such complex implementations. The current survey aims to unify the fields of VL representation learning and knowledge graphs, and provides a taxonomy and analysis of knowledge-enhanced VL models

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning

Developing artificial learning systems that can understand and generate natural language has been one of the long-standing goals of artificial intelligence. Recent decades have witnessed an impressive progress on both of these problems, giving rise to a new family of approaches. Especially, the advances in deep learning over the past couple of years have led to neural approaches to natural language generation (NLG). These methods combine generative language learning techniques with neural-networks based frameworks. With a wide range of applications in natural language processing, neural NLG (NNLG) is a new and fast growing field of research. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate the recent developments and applications of NNLG in its full extent from a multidimensional view, covering critical perspectives such as multimodality, multilinguality, controllability and learning strategies. We summarize the fundamental building blocks of NNLG approaches from these aspects and provide detailed reviews of commonly used preprocessing steps and basic neural architectures. This report also focuses on the seminal applications of these NNLG models such as machine translation, description generation, automatic speech recognition, abstractive summarization, text simplification, question answering and generation, and dialogue generation. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of the described frameworks by pointing out some open research directions.This work has been partially supported by the European Commission ICT COST Action “Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation” (CA18231). AE was supported by BAGEP 2021 Award of the Science Academy. EE was supported in part by TUBA GEBIP 2018 Award. BP is in in part funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) grant 9063-00077B. IC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 838188. EL is partly funded by Generalitat Valenciana and the Spanish Government throught projects PROMETEU/2018/089 and RTI2018-094649-B-I00, respectively. SMI is partly funded by UNIRI project uniri-drustv-18-20. GB is partly supported by the Ministry of Innovation and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office within the framework of the Hungarian Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory Programme. COT is partially funded by the Romanian Ministry of European Investments and Projects through the Competitiveness Operational Program (POC) project “HOLOTRAIN” (grant no. 29/221 ap2/07.04.2020, SMIS code: 129077) and by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “AWAKEN: content-Aware and netWork-Aware faKE News mitigation” (grant no. 91809005). ESA is partially funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “Deep-Learning Anomaly Detection for Human and Automated Users Behavior” (grant no. 91809358)