Papers by Tim Rocktäschel
Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading (D18-1)
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Marzieh Saeidi, Max Bartolo, Patrick Lewis, Sameer Singh, Tim Rocktäschel, Mike Sheldon, Guillaume Bouchard, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing work on question answering problems requires the reading of text because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader’s background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They formalise a task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 37k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 37k task instances based in real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. |
NLProlog: Reasoning with Weak Unification for Question Answering in Natural Language (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | ambiguity in natural language is difficult to interpret due to large linguistic variability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Prolog prover to extend neural networks with logic programming to solve multi-hop reasoning tasks over natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two question answering tasks and is competitive on the MedHop corpus. |
How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent improvement in the quality of natural language processing and generation (NLG) is needed for goal-oriented ML driven agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning system that integrates large-scale language modeling and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is able to act and talk naturally with respect to their motivations. |
Language Models as Knowledge Bases? (D19-1)
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Fabio Petroni, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Patrick Lewis, Anton Bakhtin, Yuxiang Wu, Alexander Miller
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a method for pretraining language models on large textual corpora . they find that they can store relational knowledge and answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language models can recall factual knowledge without fine-tuning without fine tuning . the proposed models can answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements . |
Jack the Reader – A Machine Reading Framework (P18-4)
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Dirk Weissenborn, Pasquale Minervini, Isabelle Augenstein, Johannes Welbl, Tim Rocktäschel, Matko Bošnjak, Jeff Mitchell, Thomas Demeester, Tim Dettmers, Pontus Stenetorp, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Many Machine Reading and Natural Language Understanding tasks require reading supporting text in order to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Machine Reading that allows for quick prototyping by component reuse and evaluation of new models on existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports question answering, natural language inference and link prediction tasks. |
How Decoding Strategies Affect the Verifiability of Generated Text (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Luca Massarelli, Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Myle Ott, Tim Rocktäschel, Vassilis Plachouras, Fabrizio Silvestri, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have generated text of an increasingly high quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that produces less repetitive and more verifiable text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces less repetitive and more verifiable text than previously used decoding strategies. |
Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game (D19-1)
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Jack Urbanek, Angela Fan, Siddharth Karamcheti, Saachi Jain, Samuel Humeau, Emily Dinan, Tim Rocktäschel, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston
| Challenge: | Existing studies on grounded dialogue use only statistical regularities of text data, without explicit understanding of the world that the text describes. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game allows agents to perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. |
Check Your Work: Structured Checklist Feedback for Improving Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have been driven by verifiable feedback in deterministic domains like mathematics and code. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose granular, prompt-specific checklists into a scalar reward and use them to transform them into skalar rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields an 11.8% win-rate improvement on AlpacaEval 2.0 using Qwen3-8B, outperforming holistic reward models and existing checklist baselines. |
KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks (2021.naacl-main)
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Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Angela Fan, Patrick Lewis, Majid Yazdani, Nicola De Cao, James Thorne, Yacine Jernite, Vladimir Karpukhin, Jean Maillard, Vassilis Plachouras, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge-intensive language tasks require access to large, external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT) they test a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model to generate disambiguated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms tailor-made approaches on fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialog by generating disambiguated text. |
Avoiding the Hypothesis-Only Bias in Natural Language Inference via Ensemble Adversarial Training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural models pick up on annotation artefacts and spurious correlations, resulting in learning sentences that suffer from the same biases. |
| Approach: | They propose to tackle this problem by using adversarial training to reduce the bias in sentence representations by using an ensemble of adversaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces more robust models outperforming previous de-biasing efforts when generalised to 12 other NLI datasets. |