Papers by Yoshua Bengio
HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Zhilin Yang, Peng Qi, Saizheng Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, William Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Christopher D. Manning
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) the questions provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning; and (4) a type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs and four key features that make it challenging for the latest QA systems. |
Experience Grounds Language (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yonatan Bisk, Ari Holtzman, Jesse Thomason, Jacob Andreas, Yoshua Bengio, Joyce Chai, Mirella Lapata, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jonathan May, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Nicolas Pinto, Joseph Turian
| Challenge: | aaron carroll: language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to social interactions it facilitates. carroll says successful linguistic communication relies on a shared experience of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a broader physical and social context to address communication problems . they argue that the current success of representation learning approaches is limited . |
| Outcome: | a new study suggests that the current success of representation learning requires a parallel tradition of research on the broader physical and social context of language to address the deeper questions of communication. |
Interactive Language Learning by Question Answering (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension tasks lack interactive information-seeking component of comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-asking task that asks questions in a text-based environment . they propose QAit, which uses a game generator to build models that include deep reinforcement learning agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task poses questions about existence, location, and attributes of objects found in environment. |
Combining Parameter-efficient Modules for Task-level Generalisation (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | A modular design encourages neural models to disentangle and recombine different facets of knowledge to generalise more systematically to new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular neural network where a subset of latent skills is associated with a parameter-efficient model adapter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves sample efficiency and few-shot generalisation in supervised learning compared to baselines. |
Straight to the Tree: Constituency Parsing with Neural Syntactic Distance (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Compared to traditional shift-reduce parsing schemes, our approach is free from the potentially disastrous compounding error. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that predicts a scalar for each split position in a sentence and then determines the topology of grammar tree based on syntactic distances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art single model F1 score of 92.1 on PTB and 86.4 on CTB dataset, surpassing the previous single model results by a large margin. |
Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model’s Lifetime (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | linguistic compositionality allows atoms to locally combine to create global meaning . a rich array of meanings at the level of a phrase may be explained by simple rules of composition. |
| Approach: | They propose to relate the degree of compositionality in a dataset to the intrinsic dimension of its representations under an LM, a measure of feature complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a geometric view of the compositionality of a dataset and the intrinsic dimension of its representations under an LM. |
Compositional Generalization by Factorizing Alignment and Translation (2020.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a crucial property underlying the expressive power of human language is its systematicity. |
| Approach: | They propose to make an analogous separation between alignment and translation in neural machine translation to capture compositional structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing neural networks on a compositional generalization task without supervision. |
Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Better Language Modeling: A Syntactic Distance Approach (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | incorporating syntactic structure into language models has been a challenge since the 1990s. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic information to integrate syntastic structure into neural language models by providing ground truth parse trees as additional training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves lower perplexity and better quality when ground truth parse trees are provided as training signals. |
Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural generative models are becoming more popular when building conversational agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to study the sensitivity of neural dialog models to unnatural perturbations . they experiment with 10 different types of perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to unnatural changes or perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets. |