Papers by Kenton Lee
High Performance Natural Language Processing (2020.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial on scaling natural language processing will recapitulate the state-of-the-art in the field . |
| Approach: | This cutting-edge tutorial recapitulates the state-of-the-art in natural language processing with scale in perspective. |
| Outcome: | This cutting-edge tutorial recapitulates the state-of-the-art in natural language processing with scale in perspective. |
BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper we build a reading comprehension dataset of yes/no questions that are naturally occurring . they often query for complex, non-factoid information, and require difficult entailment-like inference to solve. |
| Approach: | They build a reading comprehension dataset of yes/no questions that are naturally occurring . they find they are unexpectedly challenging and require difficult inferences to solve . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 80.4% accuracy compared to 90% accuracy of human annotators and 62% majority-baseline. |
Deep Contextualized Word Representations (N18-1)
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Matthew E. Peters, Mark Neumann, Mohit Iyyer, Matt Gardner, Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, Luke Zettlemoyer
| Challenge: | a new type of deep contextualized word representation is proposed for language understanding problems . word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model . |
| Approach: | They propose a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models complex features of word use and how they vary across linguistic contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representations improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems. |
Syntactic Scaffolds for Semantic Structures (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic scaffolds avoid expensive syntactical processing at runtime . many systems have used syntastic dependency or phrase-based parsers as preprocessing for semantic analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask learning approach that uses a syntactic treebank to integrate syntaktic information into semantic tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on PropBank semantics, frame semantics and coreference resolution tasks. |
MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering (2023.acl-long)
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Fangyu Liu, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Yasemin Altun, Nigel Collier, Julian Eisenschlos
| Challenge: | Visual language models that are pretraining on natural images or image-text pairs crawled from the web perform poorly on visual language tasks such as ChartQA and ChartQA. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are key capabilities in visual language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA by as much as 20%. |
Exploring Unexplored Generalization Challenges for Cross-Database Semantic Parsing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation datasets such as Spider are used to support cross-database semantic parsing . XSP systems that map natural language utterances to SQL queries are evaluated on databases unseen during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a setup that uses eight well-studied datasets to evaluate cross-database semantic parsing systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs well on spider, but struggles to generalize to the repurposed set. |
Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to link entities to unseen entities require in-domain labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot entity linking task where mentions must be linked to unseen entities without in-domain labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can generalize to unseen entities without metadata or alias tables . the proposed system improves over baselines, including BERT, on a new dataset . |
DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation (2023.findings-acl)
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Fangyu Liu, Julian Eisenschlos, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Wenhu Chen, Nigel Collier, Yasemin Altun
| Challenge: | Existing models for visual language reasoning require tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-shot solution to visual language reasoning by combining plot-to-text translation and reasoning over the translated text into a modality conversion module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on human-written queries on plots and charts compared with a fine-tuned SOTA model on human queries. |
QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | People express information needs with multiple preferences or constraints . modern retrieval systems struggle on such queries, a study finds . |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset of 3357 queries that map to a set of Wikipedia entities . they use crowd-sourced data to match constraints with evidence in documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset challenges models to match constraints mentioned in queries with evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. |
CapWAP: Image Captioning with a Purpose (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a traditional image captioning task uses generic reference captions to provide textual information about images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that uses question-answer pairs to provide visual information instead of generic reference captions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed captioning with a purpose task can be tailored to meet user needs . question-answer pairs are used as a source of supervision for learning visual information needs a new task is proposed . |
Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms BM25 on open datasets with a learner and reader by 19 points in exact match. |
Giving BERT a Calculator: Finding Operations and Arguments with Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end reading comprehension models have been successful at extracting text answers, but there are still problems with generalizing them to abstractive numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment a BERT-based reading comprehension model with a set of executable ‘programs’ which encompass simple arithmetic as well as extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform 33% absolute improvement on the DROP dataset, with very few training examples. |
XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a dataset of 40k information-seeking questions across seven languages is used to answer multilingual question answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task framework that allows questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to answer questions from one language to another . the dataset was built on 40K questions across 7 languages, but could not find same-language answers . |
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text without significant task-specific architecture modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a language representation model that pre-trains bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, pushing the GLUE score to 80.5 (7.7 point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement) |
Long Short-Term Memory as a Dynamically Computed Element-wise Weighted Sum (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | LSTMs were introduced to combat vanishing gradients in simple RNNs by augmenting them with gated additive recurrent connections. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple the LSTM’s gates from the embedded RNN and create a new class of RNNs where the recurrence computes an element-wise weighted sum of context-independent functions of the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs as well as an LSTM on a range of problems, strongly suggesting that the gates are doing much more in practice than just alleviating vanishing gradients. |
Jointly Predicting Predicates and Arguments in Neural Semantic Role Labeling (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent models that use gold predicates only use a single predicate at a time. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end approach for jointly predicting all predicates, arguments spans, and the relations between them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model overlapping spans across different predicates in the same output structure without gold predicate predications. |
Joint Passage Ranking for Diverse Multi-Answer Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-answer retrieval cannot reason about the set of passages jointly. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint passage retrieval model focusing on reranking to solve multi-answer retrieval problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on three multi-answer datasets. |
Higher-Order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-Fine Inference (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to coreference resolution uses a span-ranking architecture as an attention mechanism to iteratively refine span representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully-differentiable approximation to higher-order inference for coreference resolution . they propose introducing a coarse-to-fine approach that incorporates a less accurate but more efficient bilinear factor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves accuracy on the English OntoNotes benchmark while being far more computationally efficient. |
Probabilistic Assumptions Matter: Improved Models for Distantly-Supervised Document-Level Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision assumptions have enabled the creation of large-scale extractive short answer question answering systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use document-level distant supervision assumptions to pair questions and relevant documents with answer strings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by 4.3 points on TriviaQA-Wiki and 1.7 points on NarrativeQA summaries. |