A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Knowledge in Large Language Models

Xiang Lorraine Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Jordan Hoffmann, Cyprien de Masson d’Autume, Phil Blunsom, Aida Nematzadeh


Abstract
Language models (LMs) trained on large amounts of data have shown impressive performance on many NLP tasks under the zero-shot and few-shot setup. Here we aim to better understand the extent to which such models learn commonsense knowledge — a critical component of many NLP applications. We conduct a systematic and rigorous zero-shot and few-shot commonsense evaluation of large pre-trained LMs, where we: (i) carefully control for the LMs’ ability to exploit potential surface cues and annotation artefacts, and (ii) account for variations in performance that arise from factors that are not related to commonsense knowledge. Our findings highlight the limitations of pre-trained LMs in acquiring commonsense knowledge without task-specific supervision; furthermore, using larger models or few-shot evaluation is insufficient to achieve human-level commonsense performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.812
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11838–11855
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.812
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.812
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Lorraine Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Jordan Hoffmann, Cyprien de Masson d’Autume, Phil Blunsom, and Aida Nematzadeh. 2022. A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Knowledge in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11838–11855, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Knowledge in Large Language Models (Li et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.812.pdf