@inproceedings{qin-etal-2020-back,
title = "Back to the Future: Unsupervised Backprop-based Decoding for Counterfactual and Abductive Commonsense Reasoning",
author = "Qin, Lianhui and
Shwartz, Vered and
West, Peter and
Bhagavatula, Chandra and
Hwang, Jena D. and
Le Bras, Ronan and
Bosselut, Antoine and
Choi, Yejin",
editor = "Webber, Bonnie and
Cohn, Trevor and
He, Yulan and
Liu, Yang",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.58",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.58",
pages = "794--805",
abstract = "Abductive and counterfactual reasoning, core abilities of everyday human cognition, require reasoning about what might have happened at time t, while conditioning on multiple contexts from the relative past and future. However, simultaneous incorporation of past and future contexts using generative language models (LMs) can be challenging, as they are trained either to condition only on the past context or to perform narrowly scoped text-infilling. In this paper, we propose DeLorean, a new unsupervised decoding algorithm that can flexibly incorporate both the past and future contexts using only off-the-shelf, left-to-right language models and no supervision. The key intuition of our algorithm is incorporating the future through back-propagation, during which, we only update the internal representation of the output while fixing the model parameters. By alternating between forward and backward propagation, DeLorean can decode the output representation that reflects both the left and right contexts. We demonstrate that our approach is general and applicable to two nonmonotonic reasoning tasks: abductive text generation and counterfactual story revision, where DeLorean outperforms a range of unsupervised and some supervised methods, based on automatic and human evaluation.",
}
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<abstract>Abductive and counterfactual reasoning, core abilities of everyday human cognition, require reasoning about what might have happened at time t, while conditioning on multiple contexts from the relative past and future. However, simultaneous incorporation of past and future contexts using generative language models (LMs) can be challenging, as they are trained either to condition only on the past context or to perform narrowly scoped text-infilling. In this paper, we propose DeLorean, a new unsupervised decoding algorithm that can flexibly incorporate both the past and future contexts using only off-the-shelf, left-to-right language models and no supervision. The key intuition of our algorithm is incorporating the future through back-propagation, during which, we only update the internal representation of the output while fixing the model parameters. By alternating between forward and backward propagation, DeLorean can decode the output representation that reflects both the left and right contexts. We demonstrate that our approach is general and applicable to two nonmonotonic reasoning tasks: abductive text generation and counterfactual story revision, where DeLorean outperforms a range of unsupervised and some supervised methods, based on automatic and human evaluation.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Back to the Future: Unsupervised Backprop-based Decoding for Counterfactual and Abductive Commonsense Reasoning
%A Qin, Lianhui
%A Shwartz, Vered
%A West, Peter
%A Bhagavatula, Chandra
%A Hwang, Jena D.
%A Le Bras, Ronan
%A Bosselut, Antoine
%A Choi, Yejin
%Y Webber, Bonnie
%Y Cohn, Trevor
%Y He, Yulan
%Y Liu, Yang
%S Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F qin-etal-2020-back
%X Abductive and counterfactual reasoning, core abilities of everyday human cognition, require reasoning about what might have happened at time t, while conditioning on multiple contexts from the relative past and future. However, simultaneous incorporation of past and future contexts using generative language models (LMs) can be challenging, as they are trained either to condition only on the past context or to perform narrowly scoped text-infilling. In this paper, we propose DeLorean, a new unsupervised decoding algorithm that can flexibly incorporate both the past and future contexts using only off-the-shelf, left-to-right language models and no supervision. The key intuition of our algorithm is incorporating the future through back-propagation, during which, we only update the internal representation of the output while fixing the model parameters. By alternating between forward and backward propagation, DeLorean can decode the output representation that reflects both the left and right contexts. We demonstrate that our approach is general and applicable to two nonmonotonic reasoning tasks: abductive text generation and counterfactual story revision, where DeLorean outperforms a range of unsupervised and some supervised methods, based on automatic and human evaluation.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.58
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.58
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.58
%P 794-805
Markdown (Informal)
[Back to the Future: Unsupervised Backprop-based Decoding for Counterfactual and Abductive Commonsense Reasoning](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.58) (Qin et al., EMNLP 2020)
ACL