Papers by Samuel Bowman
A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | et al., 1996, show that many of the most actively studied problems in NLP depend in large part on natural language understanding (NLU). |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for machine learning that uses ten different genres of English to evaluate sentences for their meanings. |
| Outcome: | The multi-genre natural language inference corpus is one of the largest available for natural language understanding. |
Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale datasets for natural language inference are created by crowdsourcing annotations . authors show that success of natural language models to date has been overestimated . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for crowdsourcing annotations to generate 3 new sentences based on a sentence (premise) they show that a simple text categorization model can correctly classify the hypothesis alone in about 67% of SNLI and 53% of MultiNLI . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can classify the hypothesis alone in 67% of SNLI and 53% of MultiNLI datasets. |
ListOps: A Diagnostic Dataset for Latent Tree Learning (N18-4)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on latent tree learning models shows they do not learn plausible grammars . a dataset is created to study the parsing ability of such models in natural language . |
| Approach: | They propose a toy dataset to study the parsing ability of latent tree learning models . they propose 'listops' toy that has a single correct parse strategy that a system needs to learn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on sentence understanding tasks . it can learn grammars that conform to plausible semantics and syntactic formalisms . |
What Makes Reading Comprehension Questions Difficult? (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that natural language understanding benchmarks are not able to measure future progress . a crowdsourcing approach is needed to collect diverse examples without sacrificing diversity or coverage. |
| Approach: | They crowdsource multiple-choice reading comprehension questions for passages from seven sources . they find passage source, length, and readability measures do not significantly affect question difficulty . |
| Outcome: | The results show that passage source, length, and readability measures do not significantly affect question difficulty. |
Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on latent tree learning attempts to develop models with parse-valued latent variables and train them on non-parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with parse-valued latent variables and a strong latent tree learning result on constituency parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all baselines and performs competitively with symbolic grammar induction systems. |
Deep Learning for Natural Language Inference (N19-5)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial discusses cutting-edge research on NLI, including recent advance on dataset development, cutting- edge deep learning models, and highlights from recent research on using NLI to understand capabilities and limits of deep learning for language understanding and reasoning. |
| Approach: | This tutorial discusses cutting-edge research on NLI, including recent advance on dataset development and cutting- edge deep learning models. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial discusses cutting-edge research on NLI, including recent advance on dataset development, cutting- edge deep learning models, and highlights from recent research on using NLI to understand capabilities and limits of deep learning model for language understanding and reasoning. |
Training a Ranking Function for Open-Domain Question Answering (N18-4)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine reading have inspired researchers to combine Information Retrieval with machine reading to tackle open-domain QA. |
| Approach: | They propose two neural network rankers that assign scores to different passages based on their likelihood of containing the answer to a given question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve human level performance in open-domain QA compared to reading comprehension-style QA because it is difficult to retrieve the pieces of paragraphs that contain the answer to the question. |
A Stable and Effective Learning Strategy for Trainable Greedy Decoding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding text using beam search are expensive and require reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows us to reap the full benefits of beam search with no additional computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms greedy decoding and beam search on machine translation tasks with minimal computational cost. |
QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes! (2022.naacl-main)
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Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Alicia Parrish, Nitish Joshi, Nikita Nangia, Jason Phang, Angelica Chen, Vishakh Padmakumar, Johnny Ma, Jana Thompson, He He, Samuel Bowman
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language understanding are limited to processing only a few hundred words at a time. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of 5,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset with long-text comprehension questions is used to test models on long-document comprehension . the questions are validated by contributors who have read the entire passage, not just excerpts . only half of the questions can be answered by annotators working under tight time constraints . |
The Dangers of Underclaiming: Reasons for Caution When Reporting How NLP Systems Fail (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field’s successes, often in response to the field's widespread hype. |
| Approach: | They propose to use more rigorous evaluation techniques to avoid false claims about the limits of our best technology. |
| Outcome: | This paper urges researchers to be careful about these claims and suggests research directions and communication strategies that will make it easier to avoid or rebut them. |
XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations (D18-1)
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Alexis Conneau, Ruty Rinott, Guillaume Lample, Adina Williams, Samuel Bowman, Holger Schwenk, Veselin Stoyanov
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on annotated data to learn competent models. |
| Approach: | They extend the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus to 14 languages, including Swahili and Urdu. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation set extends the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 14 languages including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. |
BBQ: A hand-built bias benchmark for question answering (2022.findings-acl)
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Alicia Parrish, Angelica Chen, Nikita Nangia, Vishakh Padmakumar, Jason Phang, Jana Thompson, Phu Mon Htut, Samuel Bowman
| Challenge: | NLP models learn social biases, but little work has been done on how these biase manifest in outputs for applied tasks like question answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that highlights attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset highlights attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts. |