Papers by Richard Socher
Efficient and Robust Question Answering from Minimal Context over Documents (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that neural QA models are sensitive to adversarial inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence selector to select the minimal set of sentences to feed into a QA model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces training time and inference time by up to 13 times . it is comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art on SQuAD, NewsQA, TriviaQA and SQu AD-Open . |
GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Ben Krause, Akhilesh Deepak Gotmare, Bryan McCann, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Shafiq Joty, Richard Socher, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
| Challenge: | Existing methods for controlling LMs have limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a class-conditional LM that uses a control code to control text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is much faster than the existing methods for generating from the LM directly. |
Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | BRIDGE is a powerful sequential architecture for cross-modal semantic parsing . BRidege captures cross-modal dependencies between natural language questions and relational databases . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential architecture that captures cross-modal dependencies between questions and relational databases in cross-DB semantic parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture performs well on the well-studied Spider benchmark (65.5% dev, 59.2% test). |
It’s Morphin’ Time! Combating Linguistic Discrimination with Inflectional Perturbations (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on societal bias in NLP focuses on race and gender . linguistic background is a unique attribute that has been largely ignored in the field . |
| Approach: | They examine linguistic background to craft plausible adversarial examples that expose biases in popular NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness without sacrificing performance on clean data. |
BERT is Not an Interlingua and the Bias of Tokenization (D19-61)
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| Challenge: | Cananical Correlation Analysis (CCA) of the internal representations of a pre- trained, multilingual BERT model reveals that the model partitions representations for each language rather than using a common, shared, interlingual space. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual BERT model to partition representations for each language rather than using a common, shared, interlingual space. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the model partitions representations for each language rather than using a common, shared, interlingual space. |
Composed Variational Natural Language Generation for Few-shot Intents (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect spoken language deteriorate drastically in discriminating the few-shot intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a composed variational natural language generator (CLANG) that generates natural examples for few-shot intents in imbalanced scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two real-world intent detection datasets. |
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context (P19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2017): a dataset for cross-domain semantic parsing in context with 4,298 question sequences. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it has greater semantic diversity and can be generalized to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseened databases at test time. |
Improving Abstraction in Text Summarization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive text summarization models do not capture the abstractive nature of high quality summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose a decoder into a contextual network and a pretrained language model that incorporates prior knowledge about language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art models, based on ROUGE scores and human evaluations, while producing a significantly higher level of abstraction. |
DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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Linyong Nan, Dragomir Radev, Rui Zhang, Amrit Rau, Abhinand Sivaprasad, Chiachun Hsieh, Xiangru Tang, Aadit Vyas, Neha Verma, Pranav Krishna, Yangxiaokang Liu, Nadia Irwanto, Jessica Pan, Faiaz Rahman, Ahmad Zaidi, Mutethia Mutuma, Yasin Tarabar, Ankit Gupta, Tao Yu, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
| Challenge: | Data-to-text annotations can be costly when dealing with tables with nontrivial structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedure for extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting table headers and table title. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the semantic dependencies between table headers and title to extract semantic triples from tables. |
Simple Data Augmentation with the Mask Token Improves Domain Adaptation for Dialog Act Tagging (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on DA tagging focus on human-human social conversations, which is less applicable for task-oriented setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable mechanism that augments text input by leveraging the pre-trained Mask token from BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism augments text input by leveraging the pre-trained Mask token from BERT model. |
The Thieves on Sesame Street are Polyglots - Extracting Multilingual Models from Monolingual APIs (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated that deployed NLP models can be stolen by adversaries by querying victim models with gibberish input data that consists of random sequences of words. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract a local copy of a monolingual victim model from an API and query it with gibberish input data paired with the victim's labels. |
| Outcome: | The extracted model learns the task from the monolingual victim, but it generalizes far better than the victim to several other languages. |
WSLLN:Weakly Supervised Natural Language Localization Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn correspondence between visual segments and texts require temporal coordinates for training, which leads to high costs of annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose weakly supervised language localization networks to detect events in untrimmed videos . they train with only video-sentence pairs without accessing to temporal locations of events . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ActivityNet Captions and DiDeMo show that WSLLN performs state-of-the-art. |
Editing-Based SQL Query Generation for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Questions (D19-1)
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Rui Zhang, Tao Yu, Heyang Er, Sungrok Shim, Eric Xue, Xi Victoria Lin, Tianze Shi, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Generating SQL queries from user utterances is an important task to help end users acquire information from databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-dependent text-to-SQL generation task that edits previous queries . they use an utterance-table encoder and a table-aware decoder to incorporate context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is flexible to change individual tokens and robust to error propagation. |
Explicit Memory Tracker with Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning for Conversational Machine Reading (2020.acl-main)
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Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Irwin King, Michael Lyu, Steven C.H. Hoi
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer user questions are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational machine reading framework that uses a Explicit Memory Tracker to track whether conditions in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the ShARC benchmark and is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows. |
ESPRIT: Explaining Solutions to Physical Reasoning Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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Nazneen Fatema Rajani, Rui Zhang, Yi Chern Tan, Stephan Zheng, Jeremy Weiss, Aadit Vyas, Abhijit Gupta, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Neural networks lack the ability to reason about qualitative physics and cannot generalize to scenarios and tasks unseen during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reasoning about qualitative physics in natural language that generates interpretable descriptions of physical events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates explanations of how the physical simulation will causally evolve so that an agent or a human can reason about a solution using interpretable descriptions. |
ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models (2020.acl-main)
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Jay DeYoung, Sarthak Jain, Nazneen Fatema Rajani, Eric Lehman, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Byron C. Wallace
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art models in NLP are opaque in terms of how they come to make predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose to release a benchmark to measure the quality of rationales extracted by models and how faithful these rationale are to human annotators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will enable researchers to compare models and track progress on interpretable models for NLP. |
Find or Classify? Dual Strategy for Slot-Value Predictions on Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking (2020.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog state tracking are ontology-based and ontologie-free . however, it is not clear enough which slots are better handled by either of the two methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-strategy model that integrates both ontology-based and ontological-free methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on noisy and cleaner datasets. |
Universal Natural Language Processing with Limited Annotations: Try Few-shot Textual Entailment as a Start (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a current approach to solving NLP problems is to build a problem-specific dataset . current approaches do not allow for transforming tasks into textual entailment . |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained textual entailment system that can generalize across domains . they argue that when is it worth transforming an NLP task into textual detailment? |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize across domains with few examples, the authors argue . they show that it can be used for several downstream NLP tasks with limited annotations . |
TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models with self-attention encoder architectures are less useful in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user and system tokens to model dialogue behavior during pre-training . they propose a contrastive objective function to simulate the response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on four downstream tasks . it also has a few-shot ability that can mitigate the data scarcity problem . |
Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a weakly-supervised approach is needed to verify factual consistency . auxiliary span extraction tasks are useful for verifying factual consistent summaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly-supervised approach for verifying factual consistency . they transfer the model to summaries generated by several neural models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms models trained with strong supervision on source documents and human evaluations. |
Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianguo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenhao Liu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Yao Wan, Philip Yu, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing work on few-shot intent classification without OOS has focused on the few-shot intent classification with out-of-scope intents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BERT-style pairwise encoding to train a binary classifier that estimates the best matched training example for a user input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves more stable and accurate in-domain and OOS detection accuracy than RoBERTa-based classifiers and embedding-based nearest neighbor approaches. |
Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue state tracking are dependent on domain ontology and lack of sharing knowledge across domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a transferable dialogue state generator that generates dialogue states from utterances using copy mechanism. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that TRADE achieves state-of-the-art 48.62% joint goal accuracy for the five domains of MultiWOZ. |
Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Reward Shaping (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop reasoning is an effective approach for query answering over incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose to adopt a pretrained one-hop embedding model to estimate reward of unobserved facts and to force agents to explore diverse set of paths using randomly generated edge masks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces false negative supervision and counters spurious search trajectories by forcing the agent to explore a diverse set of paths using randomly generated edge masks. |
Photon: A Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL System (2020.acl-demos)
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Jichuan Zeng, Xi Victoria Lin, Steven C.H. Hoi, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong, Michael Lyu, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Existing natural language interfaces to databases are ambiguous or untranslatable . we present a robust, modular cross-domain text-to-SQL system . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that flags natural language input to which a SQL mapping cannot be immediately determined. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can flag natural language input to which a SQL mapping cannot be determined. |
Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to text summarization use advanced attention and copying mechanisms, multi-task and multi-reward training techniques. |
| Approach: | They evaluate datasets, evaluation metrics, and models for text summarization . they highlight three primary shortcomings: 1) datasets leave task underconstrained; 2) models overfit layout biases . |
| Outcome: | The current evaluation protocol is weakly correlated with human judgment and does not account for factual correctness. |
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (D19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Heyang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. |
Global-Locally Self-Attentive Encoder for Dialogue State Tracking (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | a global-local self-attentive dialogue state tracker estimates user goals and requests given the dialogue context . GLAD significantly improves tracking of rare states, compared to prior work . task-oriented dialogue systems can significantly reduce operating costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a global-local self-attentive dialogue state tracker which shares global-level modules with global-specific estimators for different types of dialogue states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on the WoZ state tracking task by 3.9% and 4.8%. |
Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results indicate that we can effectively leverage language models for commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use commonsense auto-generated explanations to train language models to generate explanations that can be used during training and inference in a commonsensense Auto-Generated Explanation framework. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves on the commonsenseQA task by 10%. |
SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation (2021.tacl-1)
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Alexander R. Fabbri, Wojciech Kryściński, Bryan McCann, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | a lack of comprehensive studies on evaluation metrics for text summarization hinders progress . a new study aims to improve evaluation metrics that correlate with human judgments . |
| Approach: | They propose to re-evaluate automatic evaluation metrics and share a toolkit for evaluation . they hope to promote a more complete evaluation protocol for text summarization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metrics are inconsistent with existing evaluation protocols. |